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GREENSBORO -- More than two dozen UNCG students are gearing up for an all-nighter tonight, 12 straight hours of hard work from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.

They'll slurp Starbucks long after midnight and cram weeks' worth of work into the hours before sunrise.

Big exam coming up? Nope. Term paper due? Hardly.

Truth is, there's not even a grade at stake. This sleepless night is worth far more than a grade.

Design students and professors are volunteering their time to work on a community service project with the Salvation Army of Greensboro. They'll gather at UNCG's Gatewood Studio Building for an all-night charrette -- an intense collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem -- aimed at improving the Salvation Army Family Store on West Lee Street.

Teams of students from UNCG's Interior Architecture (IARC) and Consumer Apparel and Retail Studies (CARS) departments will tackle tasks on an hour-by-hour basis through the night.

"The depth of this project could easily take weeks or months," IARC professor Nadia Volchansky said. "This is designed to get ideas quickly and get them down on paper."

Packing weeks of work into 12 hours presents its own challenges.

"We've kind of looked ahead to find what we need to focus on," said Debbie Nestvogel, a UNCG senior and president of the campus chapter of the International Interior Design Association. "We've got sort of a to-do list, and each hour each group will inherit a new responsibility. In the morning, we're hoping to have a complete initial concept."

The goal of the charrette is to come up with a plan to make the Salvation Army Family Store better -- a more customer-friendly place with improved lighting, storage and flow of donated goods.

"The students have made it a point to come in and take a hard look at our programs and what we do," Salvation Army Major Paul Egan said. "We don't put a lot of our money into overhead. Profits from the thrift store go to help paying someone's light bill, or back into the boys and girls club. So we're working on a budget. We need the store to look great and be appealing, but still fit into our mission."

The store is gigantic. The display space in front is filled with clothes and shoes, TVs and CDs, furniture and lamps. Even a piano.

Out back, donations are sorted in two large areas accessed by overhead doors. Shelves and metal bins are stacked from the concrete floor to the metal roof, and volunteers spend their work hours sorting donations and rotating stock to the front.

"This is real-life design experience," Nestvogel said. "We've done a lot of design-based projects in class, but this is an opportunity to apply what we've learned, to be involved in solving a real design problem.

"Students, especially, tend to have grand ideas that cost a lot of money," Nestvogel added. "I think the challenge here is using what already exists in the store and manipulating it to work better."

And now the clock is ticking. The all-night charrette begins soon. In a matter of hours, bleary-eyed designers will emerge with an idea to help their community.

"For them it's very practical training as opposed to just ideas in a classroom," Egan said, "and for us it's a chance to bring style to a new level in our thrift store."