Numismatics young and old will be able to complete their collections of state commemorative quarters as the U.S. Mint holds a ceremonial launch of the Hawai'i quarter.

The Hawai'i quarter is the last of the 50 state quarters to be released during the decade-old program because Hawai'i was the final state to join the union.

As with all quarters, the face of the Hawai'i quarters will feature a profile of George Washington. But the rear displays King Kamehameha I and the eight Hawaiian Islands.

It also includes the state motto in Hawaiian, which translates into English as "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness."

"Coins are just more than a medium of economic exchange," Ed Moy, director of the U.S. Mint, said in an interview here. The 50-state quarter program has "turned out to be a geography lesson as well as a state history lesson.

"All our research has shown that this has really educated a generation of American children" on those subjects, said Moy, who was in Honolulu for Monday's ceremonial launch.

Congress authorized the 50-state quarter program in 1999. Each state developed its own plan to identify a design for the back of its quarters.

In Hawai'i, a 36-member commission of community leaders and students reviewed 400 ideas and whittled them down to five finalists. The Mint then provided professional drawings.

An online poll was conducted in Hawai'i, and in April 2007, Gov. Linda Lingle announced her selection of the design entitled, "Hawaii, the Island State." That was the winner of the poll as well.

A total of about 34 billion of the special quarters will have been minted when the program ends next month, including 520 million Hawai'i quarters. Estimates are that about half of them will have been stored away by collectors.

Moy said the state quarter program has not only been an educational tool — some 3 million lesson plans have been downloaded from the Mint's Web site — but a gold mine of profits as well.

While banks that order the quarters pay face value for them, the Mint has spent between 7 to 15 cents to make each one. Last year, for example, the Mint returned $825 million in profit to the Treasury, and $6 billion over the program's life, Moy said.

The Hawai'i quarters entered circulation last Monday but it will take days or weeks before they become widely distributed around the state.

The Mint and several companies offer collecting kits of varying costs.

Congress found the 50-state program to be so popular and profitable, it authorized a new round of quarters for the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Those will be released next year.

Some collectors have been lucky enough to find quarters that included flaws.

"Some of the Wisconsin state quarters made in 2004 have an extra leaf on the cornstalk on the tail's side, and those are selling for over $100 each now," David L. Ganz, a New York City attorney and former president of the American Numismatic Association, said in a press release.

He noted that other state quarters that were mistakenly struck on the wrong metal blanks have sold for $1,000 or more. Becky Bailey, a spokeswoman for the Mint, said no flaws have been discovered in the Hawai'i quarters.

"Still, the program has become an international hit. While he is in Hawai'i, Moy is being shadowed by two officials of the Japanese Mint who are studying the U.S. program. The Japanese Mint now offers a special collectable coin for each of its 47 prefectures that commemorates the 60th anniversary of the country's establishment of local government jurisdictions.

The U.S. Mint is holding a public forum on currency and coinage issues Sunday afternoon at Iolani Palace. The Hawai'i coins will be available for purchase at the Mint's ceremony the next day in downtown Honolulu.