CIU Rams hit the (Mondo)track
$1 Million Olympic-Style track now complete
Ben Lippen’s School’s robotics team has a
lot to celebrate! The Falcon Force earned
first place against some of the top teams in
the region at the Capital City League Meet
2 event for the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)
competition.
At the FTC, teams made up of 7th to 12th
graders program robots to perform specific
tasks utilizing a reusable kit and a variety of
coding languages.
The FTC competition is just one component
of Ben Lippen’s Advanced Robotics class.
Russian entrepreneurs
glean business insight
at CIU
Columbia International University alumnus Matt
Beyer and businessman Pavel Busygin have a
lot in common. They both own coffee shops.
About the only difference between their shops
is the print on their menus. Beyer’s is in English.
Busygin’s is in Russian.
Beyer owns Grace Coffee in Columbia. Busygin’s
five shops, Perfetto Café, are in Russia, near
Moscow.
Beyer and Busygin were introduced to each other
outside Beyer’s Grace Coffee shop in CIU’s Rossi
Student Center where they exchanged bags of
their specialty coffees. Busygin was in Columbia
with five other Russian entrepreneurs as part of
a U.S. State Department effort called the Open
World Leadership Center, an exchange program
that matches citizens of the former Soviet Union
with their professional counterparts in the United
States. They were hosted on the CIU campus by
Professor Scott Adams, the dean of the School
of Business & Professional Studies, where he
discussed the CIU Business programs and the
business climate in South Carolina.
Busygin said he has been impressed with what
he calls “the
positive thinking”
of Americans and
wants to know more.
“How do they think,
how do they start a
business, how is it
different from us?”
Busygin said.
Columbia International
University Track & Field
Coach Jud Brooker says it’s
“very exciting to see all the
hard work come to fruition.”
What started as a dream in
2017 became reality with
the final touches to the
$1 million Mondotrack in
January.
“I definitely feel relieved,”
said Brooker. “The track,
equipment and entire
facility looks outstanding.”
Mondotrack supplies
track surfaces for the
Olympics and has a
worldwide reputation for
enhanced performance
and decreasing the chance
of injury. Mondotracks
are also unique for
their durability and
multicolored lanes and
runways.
CIU shares the track
with Ben Lippen School,
CIU’s Pre-K to 12th grade
Christian school on the CIU
campus. The eight-lane
multicolored Mondotrack
makes Ben Lippen the
only SCISA school with
a Mondotrack, and CIU
among the few South
Carolina colleges with
one.
The curriculum goes beyond what is required
for competition and covers electronics, drafting,
3-D modeling, and 3-D printing. Students
learn computer networking and programming
for several different platforms as they create
challenging and fun projects.
The Falcon Force Robotics team has ranked in
the top three teams each year since winning
the PTC Design Award in 2015, sponsored by
Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC). PTC
is the developer of computer-aided design
software, an essential tool in manufacturing and
product design businesses.
Ben Lippen School Robotics Team is #1
The Falcon Force: (left to right)
Haotian “Nick” Zhang, John
Windham, Yida “David” Wang, Hao
“Brian” Yu (holding flag), FengZhuo
“Ted” Shao, Wendi “Wendell” Cai,
Zhuangyu “Eric” Tang
Shyann Miller,
Meghann Miller
and Tyler Davis
of the CIU Rams
track & field
team at a winter
workout on the
new Mondotrack.
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CIU Today
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Spring 2019
CIU NEWS