Bennion Junior High history teacher Brian Fries gave his students some words of direction and encouragement before settling off on a journey to connect with western pioneers.

Luckily they only had to travel about 30 yards before reaching their destination.

That’s when the lesson began to expand into other curriculum areas, much like early American settlers expanded to the West. Upon reaching a simulated cemetery, the students had to take note of headstone information and calculate the median, mean and mode for the ages of the “buried.”

Following that, the students reached into their supplies for tape measurers to discover the precise measurements of some of the headstones. All this while expanding their knowledge of how states like Utah were originally settled.