CRANBERRY TWP — Students attending the Engineer Your Passion Workshop at Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic created a video game two weeks ago featuring the township volunteer fire department.

Four students, three from St. Kilian School and one from St. Teresa of Avila School in Ross Township, spent a day programming the game, called “Become a Volunteer Firefighter” to bring attention to the Volunteer Firefighter Initiative, which was the Cranberry Township Community Chest’s 2015 project of the year. The group also developed a video for the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) Video Competition that featured the project.

“I’m most impressed,” said Ellen Cavanaugh, the CEO of Grow a Generation, a Sewickley based organization that promotes STEM studies. “I think this was a great project for kids to get involved in.”

The video game can be found at Scratch.mit.edu, an online educational game and story generator site. The game features four levels of play, including an introduction where players see pictures of structure and vehicle fires and a volunteer application to the township fire department.

Each student created a level for the game. The students who created the game are: Everett Cannon, seventh grade, St. Kilian; Robby Jordan, seventh grade, St. Teresa; Matthew Miller, seventh grade, St. Kilian; and Jack Dixon, eighth grade, St. Kilian.

Matthew said, “I just wanted to make as fun a game as possible. I was excited.”

He created the fourth level of the game. He said he’s interested in pursuing a career in video game development and technology.

In the first level, players control a firefighter by dragging him with the computer mouse and hitting the space bar to shoot pencils at falling pieces of paper. The objective is to hit all the papers, which have the township fire department’s website URL on them.

In the second level, the player has to navigate the firefighter past flames by jumping onto ledges. In the third level, the player has to go through a maze without touching the walls. Otherwise, the player has to start over at the maze entrance.

In the fourth level, the player has to avoid flames again by jumping over them, but this time through more difficult passages with no ledges.

The game’s information lists benefits of becoming a volunteer firefighter in real life.

When the game is done, the screen shows the website links to the Cranberry Township Community Chest and to the fire department.

“So far the response of the people involved with the volunteer fire department and the Community Chest has been welcoming and encouraging,” Cavanaugh said.

Cavanaugh said the idea for the game came from searching for problems local areas faced. The one problem they focused on was the lack of volunteer firefighters.

“I was very alarmed at the great need there is for additional volunteer firefighters,” she said.

It took about five hours for the game to be created, and an additional two to three hours for final programming to be done with outside assistance.

If the video the students made wins the STEM Video Competition, Grow a Generation will win $1,000. Cavanaugh said the prize would be donated to the Community Chest.

Township Supervisor Bruce Mazzoni said he was “completely surprised” by the video game.

“It was a very nice effort,” Mazzoni said.

Mazzoni, who played the video game and found it enjoyable, said the lack of volunteers is “the number one problem” fire companies across the county face.

He is the treasurer of the Community Chest and was a main organizer of the Volunteer Firefighter Initiative, which raised nearly $400,000. That money will go to pay for trailers used for fire trainingand scholarships for people who are volunteer firefighters to attend Butler County Community College.

The four young students are eligible to be research fellows for STEM, meaning they get to choose which projects they want to focus on for the school year.

For now, the game can be found on the Scratch website and the Grow a Generation website.

Cavanaugh said she would like to see the game featured on the fire department’s website.