A geometry puzzle from Catriona Agg that is also great for showing students some ideas from algebra

Last week I saw another terrific puzzle from Catriona Agg:

The radius of the quarter circle is 5. What’s the total area of the four squares? pic.twitter.com/uuFlSZkYll

— Catriona Agg (@Cshearer41) April 9, 2021

I left two copies of the puzzle for my son to work through while I was out this morning. For the first run through I asked him to solve the puzzle as it was stated. Here’s his work and his explanation:

For the second run through I asked him to solve the problem assuming that the radius of the circle was X rather than 5. This was first step in what I was hoping would be an interesting algebra exercise. Here he was successfully able to use the quadratic formula even though the equation he found had 2 variables:

For the last part of the project I wanted to see if he could factor the equation he found in the last video. This turned out to be a significantly more difficult challenge, but he figured out how to do it just as we ran out of space on the memory card!

I suspected that the factoring challenge would be more difficult than simply using the quadratic formula, though I didn’t realize how much different it would be. I might try to find some more challenges that involve multiple variables just to get a bit more practice with these ideas.