Students continue efforts transforming shipping container into tiny home
March 17, 2025
Students at 每日大赛 are continuing to give a shipping container a makeover, working together to transform the drab, metal structure into a luxurious tiny home.
Welding Technology students recently gathered at 每日大赛’s Hardin Valley campus, where the shipping container is located, to create frames that would allow for the installation of windows into the 40-foot-long and nearly 9-foot-wide box.
“There’s no shortage of applied learning for us, but the real special experience that we get with this is being able to go out to the field,” Max Coffin, a second-year welding student at 每日大赛, said in late February as he worked on the shipping container. “And that's an important skill in this line of work.”
Interior Design Technology received a $10,000 grant for the shipping container project from the college’s Instructional Development Committee in 2024, with the goal of providing students across almost a dozen career programs with a unique experiential learning opportunity and also raising awareness around homelessness.
The recent progress on the shipping container is the culmination of a semester of behind-the-scenes work, said Associate Professor of Interior Design Technology Julie Shubzda, who spearheads the project with fellow Associate Professor Diane Riley.
“It may look like nothing’s been happening,” Riley joked outside the shipping container, “but students have been out here doing calculations. If you're in a drafting studio and you have a student that measures wrong, you just circle it and say, ‘fix it.’ Here, if you get it wrong, the hole is not the right size. So this experience is invaluable for communicating the importance of precision.”
The work completed last month by first- and second-year Welding Technology students from Pellissippi’s Strawberry Plains campus, under the tutelage of Associate Professor Adam Streich, prepares the way for the installation of new windows that were donated specifically for the project.
Next comes insulation, then electrical and plumbing.
“To actually see the building of the home is just very, very exciting for us,” Shubzda said. “Experiential learning has been our goal, and we’re already seeing the reward of it. When our students toured the container, they could literally lay on the floor to see where the bed or bathtub would go, because it’s scaled to actual size. There's no substitute for actually being in the construction space itself.”
The shipping container will ultimately be transformed through the collaboration of the following programs:
- Animation
- Architectural Design Technology
- Interior Design Technology
- Civil and Construction Engineering Technology
- Electrical Engineering Technology
- Mechanical Engineering Technology
- Welding Technology
- Audio Production Technology
- Design for Web and Print
- Photography
- Video Production Technology
- Web Technology
Sparks flew in February as Coffin and his classmates jovially cut and installed into the shipping container window frames that they had built based on measurements provided by their peers.
The transfer of knowledge that takes place between all different types of students and areas of study to make the shipping container a home has been a great opportunity, Coffin said. Though they certainly run into hiccups, he admitted, they also recognize the value of learning from one another.
“Not everybody gets the opportunity to learn how to be flexible and how to problem solve,” Coffin said. “Especially when you have limited resources. It's a great lesson in fieldwork and organization.”
Academics