As how it is told 'he' wanted to make a box with no lid for his marble connection, 'he' wants to cut out four "Identical" squares from all of the corners of the sheet (which I'm assuming is that there is four corners) and by doing so he then wants to fold all the sides...
So he buys one that is 8 by 12 inches, so you can draw a box that is (8, 12) put an 'x' at all four corners and 'cut' it the corners out.
Here's the formula that you can use... Which could be either one I guess..
-Cube = a 3
-- a is the side length
-Rectangular prism = a * b * c
-- a, b, c are the length, width, and height
The volume of a cube is side times side times side. Since each side of a square is the same, it can simply be the length of one side cubed. If a square has one side of 4 inches, the volume would be 4 inches times 4 inches times 4 inches, or 64 cubic inches.
Once you found a function I think you should use the quadratic equation, which is- y=x2-20x+96
And you could use that equation to graph it out... But if they want it to be the volume of 12 cubic inches then er-... Yeah that's were i'm stumped at... My apologies..