Our guest for today is Maxime Defauw.  He is a 15 year old author, app developer, and is inspired to teach what he learning.  Maxime began programming when whe was 11 years old.  He started to learn how to programming by copying snippets of VBS code on notepad and prank his friends by tricking forcing his friend's cdrom drive to eject over and over again.  Maxime didn't know exactly how the code worked.  He would just copy and paste the code and saw the results. Maxime's curiosity enabled him to start learning how to program on his own.  He started start to learn VBS and C# (C Sharp).  After a while, he started to learn C and then Objective-C.  He learned alot from doing and then started with Swift.  Maxime began learning how to program on his own by reading the Big Nerd Ranch books and by taking a few Swift courses on Udemy.com. He also learned how to program from reading the Apple documentation.  

Believing that teaching is one of the best ways to learn, Maxime decided to write a book about learning how to program in Swift, Apple's new programming language.  At the time when Maxime was trying to learn the language, there weren't a lot of resources available on learning how to program in Swift.

Maxime found that it was difficult to write the book because he was still a high school student.  He believes that you have to be really motivated and that you have to write every day.  Besides, his daily school homework, he also added 1 to 2 hours a day dedicated to writing his book.  He started to write his book around the Christmas holiday in 2014 and it took him approximately 2 months to complete.  In his estimation he wrote about 7 to 10 hours a week.

So while he was learning how to code in Swift, he started to teach by writing his book.  While finishing up his book, he looked to his grandmother, a former english teacher, to edit and make any corrections because english is not his native language.

While learning how to program, Maxime took his learning a step further by publishing 3 apps in the App Store.  2 of the 3 apps are games that he developed with Apple's Sprite Kit and the last app he published in both the App store and Google Play building the game in Unity 3d.  Unity is a 3D game engine.  Maxime said, "The best way of learning is by doing."

At only 15, he is already inspriational.  On top of learning how to program on his own and writing a book about learning how to program, Maxime took it a step further and decided to contribute 10 percent of the revenue from his book to a worthy cause.  Instead of thinking about helping a charity that is local to him, Maxime decided to look for an international organization.  Believing that diabetes needs more global attention, he dediced to contribute a portion of the proceeds to Life for a Child.  It is a program to help children with diabetes that is run by International Diabetes Federation.  The International Diabetes Federation helps helps children in 170 countries.

By wanting to learn and inspired to teach, Maxime wrote a book about Apple's new programming language, Swift.  At such a young age, he is already inspiring other to learn how to program while helping children across the world.  Maxime's book is available on his website, http://www.maximedefauw.com as well as a iBook at iTunes.

EP007 - Teaching Is One Of The Best Way To Learn - Maxime Defauw

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