Student Showcase

Real projects. Certified outcomes.

At Catalyst, exams are the floor, not the ceiling. Our students learn systems engineering, cloud architecture, and automation by writing real-world code — and then defending their builds before external engineers.

Cloud Engineering Aisha, Y11 (Age 15)

Project Aether: Autonomous Forest Fire Mapping

Designed a serverless telemetry processing pipeline. Real-time GPS and thermal video coordinates from mock drone flight decks are ingested by AWS IoT Core, mapped using AWS Lambda, and pushed directly to alert channels.

lambda_function.py

import json, boto3
def lambda_handler(event, context):
    # Parse incoming thermal coordinate feed
    coords = event['coordinates']
    temp = event['thermal_k']
    if temp > 330.15: # Hot pocket detected (57°C+)
        sns = boto3.client('sns')
        sns.publish(
            TopicArn="arn:aws:sns:eu-west-2:...",
            Message=f"ALERT: Flame vector mapped at {coords}"
        )
    return {'status': 'processed'}

AWS IoT Core AWS Lambda Python Terraform SNS

AWS Solutions Architect Associate

Systems Engineering George, Y12 (Age 16)

Project Nix: Zero-Trust k8s Control Plane

Built a custom Linux kernel configuration for secure edge clusters running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. george automated the hardening and node bootstrap sequences using Ansible playbooks, locking down traffic using eBPF.

harden_kernel.yml

- name: Hardening Node kernel variables
  ansible.posix.sysctl:
    name: "{{ item.key }}"
    value: "{{ item.value }}"
    sysctl_set: yes
  loop:
    - { key: 'net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter', value: '1' }
    - { key: 'net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects', value: '0' }
    - { key: 'kernel.kptr_restrict', value: '2' }

RHEL Ansible Kubernetes eBPF Go

Red Hat System Administrator (RHCSA)

Robotics & AI Year 11 Team Project

Valkyrie API: Robotic Audio Translation

Designed a sub-150ms latency translation pipeline for teleoperated robotic avatars. Built using PyTorch and WebRTC, the system translates voice streams from operators globally into local languages at the robot deck.

translate_stream.cpp

#include <webrtc/api/audio.h>
void ProcessFrame(AudioFrame* frame) {
    // Send payload buffer to Whisper TensorRT engine
    auto translated = engine.Inference(
        frame->data(), 
        frame->samples_per_channel()
    );
    DeliverToSpeaker(translated);
}

PyTorch Whisper TRT C++ WebRTC Docker

Inspired by ANA Avatar XPRIZE Semifinal

Smart Systems Arjun, Y13 (Age 17)

Helios Grid: P2P Energy Exchange

Constructed a local smart energy market simulation run on a mesh of hardware Raspberry Pi units. Used lightweight smart contracts to schedule, verify, and trade excess solar capacity dynamically between nodes.

energy_market.sol

contract EnergyExchange {
    struct Offer { uint price; uint watts; address seller; }
    mapping(uint => Offer) public activeOffers;
    function buyEnergy(uint offerId) public payable {
        Offer storage offer = activeOffers[offerId];
        require(msg.value == offer.price, "Incorrect payment");
        payable(offer.seller).transfer(msg.value);
    }
}

Solidity Raspberry Pi Python Web3.js

University Entry Project Portfolio

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