FLL Casts Website Review

There are a lot of website and videos out there to help teachers and students learn Lego Mindstorms building and programming.  So in my opinion anybody charging a subscription fee for their website would want to be offering an extremely high quality service.  Enter fllcasts.com.

FLL Casts is a website run by five gentlemen in Bulgaria, who have extensive FLL experience in all aspects including tournament judging.  At the time of writing this, the website has 92 video tutorials ranging from robot design and building (see my resources page for an adapted version of their EV3 competition robot), to software and sensor tutorials to discussions on how to complete the FLL challenges from seasons past.  There is also links to competition rules and details for FLL seasons dating back to 2007.   Videos are often supplemented with PDF materials of the designs or Mindstorms software downloads.

As EV3 is only a few years old much of the content is still based on NXT technology which while beneficial for some, it is fast hitting a point that this content will be redundant (at the Victorian FLL Championships last year more than half the teams used EV3).  

At the moment they seem to provide a new video around once a week and from what I can tell they seem to have been in operation for just over 2 years. So the one video a week seems pretty consistent over that time.

The videos are clear and concise, with most lasting between 4-10 minutes.  When they are longer they usually split them into at least two parts or 10 parts in the case of the "Big Daddy" robot tutorial.  Although there is usually around 60 seconds "preview" at the start of each video for the non subscribers.

Community wise they seem to have a number of subscribers that comment on videos although it seems pretty rare to see many more than 5-6 comments on any one video.  To their credit they engage with the commenters and respond to their, questions, ideas, or criticisms.  I'd like to see this really expanded perhaps even into a forum for discussion on issues, currently this is done on comments, and their Facebook page.

Personally I've enjoyed the videos I've seen so far and have gained something out of the website.  Even showing my students one or two of them to give them ideas. But for $8USD a month ($10+AUD) I can't see myself remaining a subscriber all year.  I've watched a number of videos that interest me but at one video a week and no huge community to add content and discussion it's not really long term value for money.   Maybe I'll sign back up later in the year for another month and watch the videos from the last six months that I've missed.

Summary
Good website, lots of content, not value for money.