FireMe: Development of Gamifying Fire Safety Awareness and Prevention using A* Algorithm

The number of reported fire incidents in the Philippines has gone down in the previous years, but the loss in lives and properties has gone up. The Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) pursues a fire safety awareness and fire prevention campaign to address this phenomenon. FireMe, a mobile gaming application based on the source material provided by the BFP, was created to support this campaign. The researchers utilized the concept of gamification and applied algorithm to the pathfinding techniques in developing the game. The time and space complexity of the A star algorithm was determined by the factor of the number of nodes. Forty BFP personnel from eight adjacent municipalities in Laguna province were asked to evaluate FireMe using a questionnaire based on the ISO Form 9126 of Software Product Quality. The results show that the software passed the ISO 9126 standards in that obtained 4.39 which is Strong Agree meet all five criteria. The researchers believe that this implies that educational games enhanced by a computing theory such as algorithms can significantly contribute to the learning process.