My name is Reece Takayama. I graduated from Mililani High School. After graduating high school, I was pretty lost on what I wanted to do in college. So as a result I spent most of my time in the first two semesters at UHWO just taking my general ed classes. I also was looking at the other classes on the side and getting degree recommendations from the other club members in ISC (International Student Club) that I joined. Towards the end of my second semester I overheard people talking about the creative media degree and decided to see what’s it about. Starting out I pretty much had very little experience with Adobe software and design as a whole, but throughout the courses I was able to gain a solid understanding of the basics for almost all of the software and some important design pointers through the countless feedback from my teachers. These skills ended up helping me with other areas of my life, such as my ISC officer duties when another member needed to have something designed or formatted for advertising, improving the idea process for my drawings, and being able to give out helpful feedback myself. In addition to that, throughout my time at UHWO I also gained an interest in language learning and started to learn Japanese again. It led me down a path of wanting to find language tools to help make learning a language less stressful since I had a difficult time in the past learning a second language. This ultimately led me to the idea of a language learning and video game related project for my senior capstone. I will be graduating with a BA degree in Creative Media with a concentration in Design & Media. If I were an artist’s tool I would probably be the eraser since most of my time is spent scrapping or making edits to my designs in some way.