Perhaps also for some gifted high school classes. The key to it being a success is to impress on the students that science is not just regurgitating facts, but involves combining facts and other information to explain things. Sometimes I use this exercise in the middle of the semester - after students have gone through the usual chapters on sedimentary rocks and geological time, etc. Other times I use this very early in the course - after only a brief introduction to time and rocks. Either way it works, but I think they get more out of it if they do it before we discuss time and rocks in detail.
Students are smart, and they can figure things out if given the right encouragement.
And, if they figure out a history of the Grand Canyon, they have an appreciation for time and sedimentary environments that carries naturally into lectures, chapters, or other sources of information. The project has two parts. First the students go through some photos and answer questions. The questions and the photo captions give them some valuable information that they will use in the second part of the exercise. For the second part of the exercise they have to write a history of the Grand Canyon.