Redmoor Academy is a Key Stage 3 (age 11-14) school in Leicestershire, UK, with a student cohort just over 500 pupils. The Academy has a long history of encouraging pupils to consider how STEM subjects relate to each other and to their future careers, and has made great inroads into ensuring that all teachers of STEM subjects are delivering the same message. This article describes using "Practical Action" resources aligned with STEM problem-solving activities to give students a real sense of how STEM can be used to change people's lives around the world. The global element of the "Practical Action" challenge was used by the Head of Geography Department to challenge the students with a project named "Beat the Flood," which involved designing a house that would withstand high winds, heavy rain, and tidal surges based on a recent typhoon in the Philippine Islands. The pupils spent hours on this challenge and were completely engaged in collaborating on ways to test materials and design a model. The result of the "Beat the Flood" project made the students aware that challenges affect their world, they is real, and not just academic theoretical problems.