Another great task from @mre_maths, in his own words below:

“I was inspired by one of my favourite tasks from Practising Mathematics (by Tom Francome and Dave Hewitt) called Expression Cards. I love the idea that students are given a goal which ‘distracts’ them (in this case, ordering the expressions), and in order to achieve the goal they must practise the relevant skills. I also like the idea of giving students opportunities to notice things, make connections and go off in their own direction. I took this idea and applied it to an area task. I thought hard about how I could manipulate the questions so that students could make connections (e.g. the relationship between the triangle and parallelogram), and I found the compound shapes plus the trapezium tricky to incorporate as I didn’t want the diagrams to be disproportionate (ie the shorter side having a longer length), which is why I opted to restrict the lengths to greater than 1.”