News-Gazette photo by Robert K. O'Daniell

Ted Rowland of Champaign and Shirley Evans of St. Joseph at the end of a mini musical play in which their team, the a-MUSE-ments, explained how a Greek muse inspired Lewis Carroll to write 'Alice in Wonderland' during their portion of the Senior Odyssey Tournament on Saturday at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana.

Yo, graduates — new diploma in hand and thinking school is out not just for the summer, baby, but for good — take one more lesson from folks like Doris Downs, 78, of Savoy and Mamie Brown, 49, of Champaign, who graduated after a fashion themselves this weekend.

"I'm probably going to be a lifer as far as going to school and getting educated," said Brown, who graduated Saturday from the Odyssey Project, a college-accredited course in the humanities offered at no cost to people living below the federal poverty level.

Meanwhile, Downs and her teammates on the Live Wires team, all senior citizens, gave a final presentation covering their 14-week project in the Senior Odyssey program, which is unrelated to the Odyssey Project save in spirit and connection to the University of Illinois.

The group presented an amusing mini play built around the theme of a Greek muse inspiring a historical figure in some way — in this case, Ben Franklin's urge to go fly a kite. Its members participated in the Senior Odyssey Tournament for the first time as part of a UI study involving cognition and aging. But the seniors from Champaign, Urbana, Savoy and Mahomet have kept doing it in the three years since because they find the intellectual challenge, well, fun.

When the competition took a year's hiatus here, they even traveled to Belleville to compete against school kids in the Odyssey of the Mind program, after which the senior version is modeled. They scored 295 of a possible 300 points, noted Downs' teammate John Garver, 85, of Savoy.

"We enjoy it," Downs said after the group's presentation at Carle's Forum. "We enjoy our group."

UI Professor Elizabeth Stine-Morrow said the idea is to see if working through the same creative, teamwork-oriented, long- and short-term problems as kids in Odyssey of the Mind improves the brain function of older people related to memory, for instance, or organizational skill. Early returns seem to indicate that it does, Stine-Morrow said.

Downs doesn't doubt it.

"I think it helps our brains," she said.

For Mamie Brown and her five fellow 2007-08 Odyssey Project graduates, the course in philosophy, literature, art history and history is designed to serve as a transition experience for people who have never gone to college or want to go back, said UI Professor John Marsh, its director.

The program, which started locally just last year, already has one student enrolled at the UI and others taking classes at Parkland College in Champaign.

"I wanted to continue my education and it kind of fit the criteria of what I needed to get back in school," said Brown, who's already been taking some classes at Parkland.

But Marsh said he's also finding that some participants go through the course with no plans for college. They simply have a desire to learn.

That's despite holding down a job, or more than one, family commitments and other challenges, making it an "astonishing achievement" for them to finish, Marsh said before the graduation ceremony at Champaign's Douglass Branch Library.

Brown plans to end up at Eastern Illinois University and knows where she wants her education to take her — a place where learning undoubtedly would remain on her mind.

"I want to go into teaching," she said. "That's my long- term goal."