Minecraft, the widely popular, first-person perspective, 3D video game with a goal of acquiring, retaining, and using “blocks” of raw materials to build a virtual world, allows its players a significant amount of autonomy while playing. CHS senior Quentin Farrell has taken full advantage of that freedom by using KubeJS, a Minecraft mod, to create JavaScript code to modify and expand the game. Farrell, mostly self-taught himself, then taught other coders how to do the same. In the process, he became one of the Minecraft community’s most relied upon and active users, contributing regularly by posting and answering questions.
For those of us who need a dictionary, and a bit more tech education, to fully understand all of that, the shorthand is: Quentin Farrell knows his way around technology and is a leader in helping others to make their way in that world. In fact, on September 21st, at its Innovator Awards Luncheon at the Wenatchee Convention Center, NCW Tech Alliance named Farrell its 2022 “Future Technology Leader of the Year.”
NCW Tech Alliance is a non-profit organization that serves its over 150 member businesses and, more generally, the six-county community making up North Central Washington. Since the turn of the century, the Alliance has hosted and supported dozens of technology events each year and is a resource for, and promoter of, technology, entrepreneurship, and STEM education in our region.
The Future Technology Leader of the Year award is sponsored by Equilus Capital Partners, a private capital equity firm with an office in Wenatchee. The award is presented to a “K-12 student who demonstrates leadership and innovation.” A panel of local entrepreneurs, business representatives, educators chose among three finalists, which included, in addition to Farrell, students from Wenatchee’s Pinnacles Prep and WestSide High School.
Chanet Stevenson, the Community Impact Manager at NCW Tech Alliance, said that what most impressed the Alliance about Quentin was that “he has taken Minecraft from being just a game to also being a programming learning platform. Yes, he did all the coding and design on his own, which is impressive enough, but then making it usable for others is what makes him a real leader.”
Farrell, no stranger to technology awards, including winning first place in Washington State in the category of Computer Coding as a middle-schooler, plans to continue working on Minecraft evolution and creation, and other projects with the CHS Technology Student Association this year. Thereafter, he plans to attend a university with a strong computer science program, like the University of Washington.
“I see doing computer science for the rest of my life,” reflected Farrell. “I’m always looking at something to see if I can make it better; to see if I can make it do more interesting things. Early on, I realized that maybe the best thing is not necessarily what [the original developer] actually wants me to do with [a program], but whether I can use other ways to make more advanced versions; how I can push the limits of what it can do and share that knowledge. Yeah, that’s what I want.”
CHS science and mathematics teacher, Dayle Massey, Farell’s titular advisor on his award-winning project, nonetheless is well acquainted with Farrell’s academic acumen, having taught him in numerous CHS courses. Massey initially emphasized that Farrell “worked on this project entirely on his own - without my help, at all.” Massey then continued by describing Quentin as someone who is “capable of doing a lot. I'm sure that he’ll have a very successful college career and then will excel at whatever he chooses to do. He’s naturally good at [tech] and loves it. Those two things together are a dangerous combination that will allow him to go far. He has a lot of potential.”
With only the tip of that iceberg of potential yet realized, and having already been named a Future Technology Leader of the Year, Quentin Farrell is a CHS senior to watch.
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