I had already talked to many teams from the NC regional tournament last year and this years' SC regional, so it did not take me long to find the new teams that I had not contacted before. Again, I spent more time observing the teams and thinking about what research questions would be good for theoretical and practical purposes.
Some volunteers and mentors talked to me about things that might be helpful for me to understand students' emotions, as well ass the team formation, and robot design. These are all interesting! Even though I did not prepare the structure to talk to the kids and mentors about a specific topic, but random conversation already gave me good ideas to think about. I wish I talked to them more.
Besides, it was also fun to bring four Chinese friends to the event. They are all graduate students in NC State, majoring in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Plant Pathology. They had never experienced this kind of event in China either and were amazed by how young and how creative students were to build the robots in such a short time period.