Disney Commemorative Coins

What is this? Why did you make this?

In preparing to go on vacation to Disneyland in January 2020, we wanted to give the children some spending money in the shops, but we didn't want to give children under six actual money. At the same time, they needed to have some concept of how much money they could spend. To this end, I created these coins to let the kids hold their “money”.

The beauty of this is also that we were able to adjust the values. For instance a ten piece could be worth $10 USD or it could be $1 USD. This is not to say we changed it on the fly, but that before we gave them the coins, we could make a choice on how much to give them.

After the trip, the kids have used these coins as tender for their playthings, and math manipulatives for learning basic addition and money skills.

Printing and Printing Settings

I printed these in PLA, and used the 0.15mm Quality profile. I experimented with different sizes for the coins and settled on not going smaller than ~3 cm. 

I toyed with the idea of having each denomination a different size and color, but ended up only printing one size and color for all the coins. I made this choice to make the kids actually look at the coins and help them learn their numbers.

Assembly

If printed on an FDM machine, you'll want to print the two sides of each coin separately. In order to get the full coin, you will need to glue or solvent weld the two sides together.

After glue-up, I took a sharpie and colored in a couple coins. I did not like how this looked, so for actual coins given to the kids I did not color them.

Going Forward

I would really like to see this design printed on an SLA printer, but I don't have access to these. I've included a single body coin for each for those of you who can try and print an SLA version.

In that same vein, when I started this project I didn't have an MMU upgrade. I think that it would be good to try a multi color print and print the full body version with dissolvable supports.

Remix

I've included too the Fusion 360 files so that anyone can remix as they want. The coins here are from our 2020 trip, so that is the date on the coins. If you want to change it, I've provided the source files.