Squarification

I think this is what Daniel meant.

Given the blocks that are in the figure, if we re-arrange the blocks in some way (maybe with cutting the blocks up) to form a square, what will be the side length of that square?

Since we have $17$ blocks, we can re-arrange them to form a square with sides of length $\boxed{\sqrt{17}}$ .

And I do have to agree with the reports that the hits are unnecessary, because using the Pythagorean Theorem is a fairly simple task. Maybe they are also misleading as the reader focuses too much on the hints and trying to apply them.

There are 17 blocks.

So the square root is definately √17