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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.

6

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CIU Today

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Spring 2019

CIU NEWS