Simultaneous Equations

I have a pretty high flying group of year 8's and I wanted to give them a bit of a challenge.  I used twitter as I usually do to look for inspiration and probably not surprisingly, when I searched simultaneous equations the main theme that appeared was students complaining that they had to learn simultaneous equations when they will NEVER use them in their real lives.  But actually, as geeky as it might be, this is one of the things that you might actually use in real life if you know how to use simultaneous equations in context.  Now I didn't find the most inspiring example to start with, but because my students are clever and because they love to learn they still got right involved.  I put this questions on the board:

The admission fee at a small fair is$1.50 for children and $4.00 for adults. On a certain day, 2200 people enter the fair and $5050 is collected. How many children and how many adults attended?

I let students work in groups and just asked them to try and calculate how many adults and children attended the fair.  Students naturally began with trial and error which is what I expected.  Also, my most clever mathematician decided to form an equation to start to solve for a variable.  

I had my class split into three levels, and the weakest ones sat looking at each other so in retrospect I should have differentiated tasks.  I stepped in and asked the weakest group to try and form equations to represent what we knew.  So they did come up with a + c =2200 and 4a + 1.50c = $5050.  

All groups at this point now had something they could realistically achieve.  I allowed students to take turns going up to the board, I stepped in a few times to offer a few hints and eventually we solved the problem.  I then gave students a couple more problems and as to be expected they got more efficient at solving them.  

The best part for me, was the fact I spent the majority of time at the back of my classroom watching the groups work.  I realized how I had fallen into the teacher talk style of lessons too often lately and whilst my students were being productive, making progress and developing their skills they weren't inspired, excited or really engaged in lessons like they were on that day.  It was a gentle reminder that even the most "when will we need this" topics can be interesting when students know when they can use it and they aren't being prescribed steps to solve something new.