Virtual Campus

A high-performance virtual studio.

Our students don't sit in passive virtual classrooms. They work from a custom digital studio utilizing professional DevOps pipelines, async messaging hubs, and physical hardware labs shipped to their homes.

How we work

A day in the life of a Catalyst engineer.

Traditional online schools try to copy physical classrooms using Zoom links. Catalyst is designed differently. We copy the working methodologies of elite software engineering teams: fluid sync-meetings, transparent code reviews, and structured task boards.

1. Async First

Continuous support through our Slack and Discord hubs. Students share code logs, troubleshoot deployment errors, and coordinate builds with their cohort and teachers in real-time.

2. 1-to-1 Syncs

Daily dedicated face-to-face video discussions with subject specialists. Rather than lecturing, teachers act as senior team leaders, debugging blocks and guiding code architecture.

3. The Oral Viva

Every major project concludes with an oral defense. Students demonstrate their working system live to two internal faculty members and an external industry engineer.

The Stack

Professional engineering tools. Shipped to your home.

We train students using the exact software environments used by industry-leading cloud and systems teams. No dummy simulations, simplified tests, or sandboxed environments.

  • GitHub Enterprise: Every student manages their coursework in Git repositories. Coursework is submitted via Pull Requests (PRs), reviewed line-by-line by faculty.
  • Jupyter & VS Code: The standard environments for data science, automation scripting, and systems configuration.
  • Notion Workspace: Used to document project plans, record system architecture, and map out AWS migration paths.
  • At-Home Hardware Kit: Shipped to all students at start of term — includes Raspberry Pi 5 node, sensor boards, software defined radio, and AWS/Red Hat sandbox accounts.
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.4
$ ansible-playbook site.yml
PLAY [Secure Edge Clusters] ****************
TASK [Hardening SSH Configuration] *********
changed: [node-01]
AWS SANDBOX ENVIRONMENT ACTIVATED // ACCOUNT LEVEL 1

Experience a day at Catalyst

Book a single, dedicated 1-2-1 taste session with a Catalyst teacher for £79 to experience our virtual studio directly.

Book introductory session