Martina Gonzalez, a retired mathematics teacher, and her husband own Creative Flooring, a ceramic tile company. Creative Flooring designs and produces tiles in the colors and dimensions that the client specifies, as long as the tiles are triangles, parallelograms (including rectangles that can be squares), or trapezoids. The company will use only one shape to tile each room. Martina would like to create a computer program that will quickly determine the number of tiles needed for a specific room when someone enters the dimensions of the desired tiles and the dimensions of the room to be tiled. She has a hunch that the program could rely on just one area formula for all the shapes that the company stocks.

Is there one formula that will work for triangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids?

Discuss your solution and compare students learning if you were to open a unit on area with this activity versus using the Visualized Geometry activities.