Sharing a powerful IDEA: learning organizations collaborating to innovate and design engaging applications in STEM education William L. Sterrett, Rauf I. Azam, Mahnaz Moallem, Jess Boersma, Ahsan Bashir, Karl Ricanek, Mohammad Alam Saeed, Intzar Hussain Butt, Aisha Mahmood, Sohail Masood Sukhera and Christopher Raymond Gordon Purpose Working with educational organizations that span continents, languages, and educational contexts provides the means to collaboratively work together to tackle challenges and find new opportunities to create, problem-solve, and learn together. Engaging students in important topics such as natural resource management and energy use is timely and relevant, and this work requires updated professional development. This study brought educators together from three universities in the United States and Pakistan in an effort to focus on economic growth and collaborative relationships between the US and Pakistan through a US State Department Grant, titled “Innovating and Designing Engaged Applications in STEM Education (IDEA-STEM): Expanding the knowledge and Capacity of Pakistani Institutions.” This work focused on expanding knowledge and capacity in middle schools in the Punjab region of Pakistan, with a particular focus on underrepresented students, and sought to improve middle grades instruction in areas such as coding, water and natural resource management, energy, and other critical STEM areas, by using hands-on projects and applications. Literature Teaching and learning in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is bolstered when teachers and educational leaders provide inquiry- based learning opportunities that allow for interdisciplinary collaboration, deeper thinking, and research applications both inside and outside the classroom (Buckner and Boyd, 2015). Through equipping teachers, this work can thus equip students to solve tomorrow’s problems. Through a systemic “STEM shift” educators can reconsider how learning occurs in “new learning environments, new structures, and new relationships” (Myers and Berkowicz, 2015, p. 16). This work built upon prior research that occurred in rural part of the United States (Moallem et al., 2016) with the recognition that the Pakistani colleagues had an established curriculum that required thorough review in order to adapt the activities to the curriculum, not vice versa. Being cognizant of the curriculum and then identifying learning activities that aligned with the stated objectives were “shaped to help the learners master the objective” (Glatthorn et al., 2012, p. 245) of the Pakistani STEM curriculum. (Information about the authors can be found at the end of this article.) The authors would like to acknowledge the funding from the US State Department that made this work possible through the Cultural Affairs-Pakistani Partnerships grant (SCAISB-18-AW-006- 02012018. CFDA 19.501- Public Diplomacy Programs for Afghanistan and Pakistan). DOI 10.1108/DLO-06-2019-0137 VOL. 34 NO. 2 2020, pp. 9-12, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1477-7282 j DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING IN ORGANIZATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL j PAGE 9