One of the cornerstones of early childhood education is literacy education. However, this process is often presented linearly: reading comes first, writing comes second. This neglects the creative capacities of the child until he is fully capable of reading. This paper presents RoyoBlocks, a project that explores literacy learning through a set of tangible wooden word blocks and a plush reading companion. By incorporating wireless technology with traditional childhood toys, RoyoBlocks provide pre-literate leaners an opportunity to practice and hone both their reading and writing skills. In this paper, we discuss the learning processes that informed our design and the subsequent design decisions we made while developing RoyoBlocks.

We describe how to combine a minimal Trusted Computing Base (TCB) with polyinstantiated and slightly augmented Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software programs in separate Single Level Secure (SLS) partitions to create MultiLevel Secure (MLS) applications. These MLS applications can coordinate fine grained (intra-document) Bell LaPadula (BLP) [6] separation between information at multiple security levels. The untrusted COTS programs in the SLS partitions send at-level file edits as diff transactions to the TCB. The TCB verifies that BLP semantics will be observed and then patches these transactions into its canonical representation of the file. Finally, it releases appropriately filtered versions back to each SLS partition for re-assembly into the COTS program's standard file format. Furthermore, by judiciously restricting how the user can interact with the system the multiple SLS instantiations of the COTS program can be made to appear as if they are a single MLS instantiation. We demonstrate the utility of this approach using Microsoft Word and DokuWiki.