This paper presents an educational machine vision application demonstrating the versatility of the Hough Transform for shape detection. The Circular Hough Transform, applied with a two-dimensional accumulator space and conventional pre-processing, is integrated in an application that identifies individual coins in the Euro currency set and calculates the total value of a group of coins. Different acquisition distances and different coins can exist in variable numbers and locations while coin overlapping is very well handled by the implemented algorithm. The application was developed in the context of a Computer Vision and Multimedia course unit, using high level industrial machine vision software.