Find the area of the shaded region and show me how to solve it

Alright hear me out. Imagine your looking at the triangles in the corners but they're full squares and not triangles. Thats what you want to do. Imagine they're squares. We know the height and length of these squares (6 and 6). And to find the area we must multiply that (6 x 6). You get 36. Now, you're not done. We imagined these were squares for a but. But in reality they're triangles. These triangles are half of the squares we imagined. So we take 36 which is the area of the square we imagined and divide it by 2. (36/2) since the triangle is 50% of the square we imagined. After this we get 18. This is not our final answer either. Since we have 4 triangles and now we know 1 triangle is 18. We take the area of one triangle and multiply it by the amount of total triangles shaded. (18 x 4) Which is 72.  72 Being your final answer. Hope this helps you!