You are very much on the right track with this one. I would not worry about the fact that you are implementing an array solution before arrays are covered in the lectures. What matters is that you understand when and how to use them. If your program passes check50 then you wrote a good program.
It looks like you are not doing anything with coin_val... do you maybe want to add it to something?
Edit: I was wrong in my description of increment operators, see gnu c manual