Indonesians may be jokingly referred to as people who are terrible at remembering things, but the outstanding achievements of several Indonesian students at an international competition in Kuala Lumpur should do away with that stereotype.

Twenty-one Indonesian students showed exceptional memory skills at the 2017 Malaysia Open Memory Championship, in which they claimed the title of overall winner.

Shafa Annisa, 12, is one of the Indonesian students who fought in the memory contest. She won two gold, three silver and one bronze medal in the championship that assesses contestants’ memorizing capacity.

“I am happy about winning the competition. Even though I found it difficult to concentrate for more than 10 minutes and to compete with other great contestants, I managed to win,” she told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

Shafa, a junior-high student at the Kesatuan Bangsa Bilingual School in Yogyakarta, memorized 220 random images within five minutes and 94 random numbers within 94 seconds in the competition.

All participants, children and adults, were asked to rack their brains in 10 categories: names and faces, random words, binary numbers, speed numbers, random images, random numbers, random cards, historic and future dates, spoken numbers and speed cards.

Shafa and 20 of her teammates from the Indonesian Memory Sports Association won 27 medals, comprising six gold, 12 silver and nine bronze medals in the Kids and Junior categories.

They competed against representatives from China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand in the competition held by the Malaysia Mnemonic Association together with the Asia Memory Sports Council and the International Association of Memory, at HELP College of Art and Technology in Kuala Lumpur from July 22-23. Association chairman Yudi Lesmana said this was the highest-ever achievement for the team in nine championships since 2014.

“Last year, we only got nine medals, but earlier this year, we received 23 medals in the championship in Korea, and now 27 medals in the latest championship in Malaysia,” he told the Post during an interview in Jakarta on Wednesday.

To prepare the team members for the championship, Yudi said, he had introduced 20 different methods into the training program to sharpen their memorizing skills. Intensive training sessions were held five hours a day from June 12-17 in Jakarta.

“After that, the team members were required to practice at home, while we monitored them through a website, by phone and email until the championship was held last weekend,” he said.

While members of the Indonesia Memory Sports Association vary in age, most of them are children who want to increase their performance at school, like Shafa.

Shafa said she applied the memorizing methods to help her with school subjects.

“When I use my imagination, it becomes fun and easier to learn and understand what other people might think of as difficult subjects,” she said.

Shafa said she was looking for higher achievements in memory sports competitions by practicing the methods she had learned on a daily basis. Currently she is preparing for a memory sports championship in Hong Kong this August.

“I have set myself the target of getting the title of Grand Master of Memory at [that] competition,” she said. (ecn)

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