---
title: "Catapult"
description: "CATAPULT is the reference point for cmi5. It was funded by the US Department of Defense and built by ADL with Rustici, and it is the closest thing the specification has to an executable definition of itself: requirements/requirements.json maps every numbered requirement in the cmi5 specification to its wording, and the applications in the repository are all built against that index."
canonical_url: "https://scorm-tools.com/tools/catapult"
last_updated: "2026-10-31T10:21:59.980Z"
---

CATAPULT is the reference point for cmi5. It was funded by the US Department of Defense and built by ADL with Rustici, and it is the closest thing the specification has to an executable definition of itself: `requirements/requirements.json` maps every numbered requirement in the cmi5 specification to its wording, and the applications in the repository are all built against that index.

Those applications answer different questions. The player is a launching system you can embed in an LMS — import, validate, launch, session tracking, statement proxying to an external LRS. The Content Test Suite tells a content developer whether their AU behaves; the LMS Test Suite tells a platform developer whether their launching system does. The course examples are worked packages demonstrating masteryScore, moveOn variants and multi-AU structures, which is often the fastest way to understand a clause you have read three times.

The caveats are practical rather than technical. This is prototype-quality software published as a reference — Docker Compose deployments, a Vue 2 test-suite UI, and an issue list that reflects a project whose funding ended. Recent commits are dependency upgrades rather than features, with v1.0.8 in January 2026.

If you are shipping cmi5 in either direction, you should be testing against this. If you want a supported cmi5 player to run in production, buy one.