Newsletter: February 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of the Royal Mint Museum Newsletter. This month the Royal Mint Museum team have been focusing on education and our latest cataloguing project reaches an important milestone. Find out more below.
Lego Leagues Day
February saw the South Wales regional heat of the Lego Leagues competition. This is an international school’s competition run by Lego which involves teams from both Primary and secondary schools building multifunctional robots to complete a series of challenges, competing against each other in live events.
In Wales, the competition is facilitated by STEM Cymru: Engineering Education Scheme Wales, an educational charity with which the museum has worked on various STEM (Science Technology Engineering Maths) projects over the last few years.
Our Education Manager was asked to be one of the official judges for the South Wales competition that was held at St Fagans Museum of National History in Cardiff.
It was a really exciting day with lots of amazing talent on display from the pupils. There were a number of prizes on offer to the teams, and winners were presented with trophies built out of Lego.
STEM Cymru
The Museum also assisted The Royal Mint and STEM Cymru with the delivery of a Girls into STEM event day, designed to encourage girls to study STEM subjects and inform them about career options in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Maths) in an inspirational way.
Eleven students from a local secondary school spent a full day at the Mint, watching presentations and talking with staff about their own career paths and the different jobs available within the organisation. After lunch the Museums education manager took the girls on a tour of our exhibition and ran a workshop session in our teaching space.
The day was very well received and there are plans to run the event once a term for other students. This was part of the STEM Strategy that the Royal Mint and the Royal Mint Museum are jointly undertaking to promote STEM subjects and support future careers within the organisation.
Short Story Competition is now open
The Museum team have just launched this year’s short story competition. The first competition was run back in 2021 to mark the 50th anniversary of decimalisation, and it has grown into a real success story over the last five years, attracting more than 1,000 entries last year from children all across the UK.
We choose a different theme for each competition with this year’s theme being ‘Sustainable Futures, and we’re excited to announce our celebrity judge, presenter and broadcaster Micheala Strachan! Inspiration for budding authors is focused on the Royal Mint’s move to be a more sustainable business.
We are also giving entrants more opportunities to win, with more prizes on offer this year.
For more information and to enter the competition see click here
Medal Cataloguing Project
Eight months after joining the team, Collections Assistants Kelsie Neak and Richard Phelps have successfully added information for all our medals to the online database - an impressive feat, considering the collection includes more than 12,000 medals! Their work not only helps Royal Mint staff quickly locate objects for photography and exhibitions, but will ultimately make the entire medal collection accessible for anyone to explore online.
Beyond the expected gallantry and artistic medals, the collection holds plenty of unusual and fascinating objects. Along the way, Kelsie and Richard have uncovered all sorts of intriguing oddities, including Brian May’s custom-made plectrums, pin badges from the Soviet space program, and special tokens once used by Royal Mint employees to make purchases on-site, such as in the staff canteen.
Despite their tremendous progress, there’s still more to be done. Over time, these records will be updated with inscriptions and images—as long as our photographer, Dave, can keep up with the rapid pace his colleagues have set!
Reflecting on this milestone, Kelsie said, “I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short time. It’s rewarding to know we’ve made life easier for our colleagues while also making the medal collection accessible to people around the world.”