You earn medals by participating in Tours on Tortimer's Island. You can either do this solo, with friends, or through random matchmaking through the Internet.
The number of medals you are awarded is dependent on how well you do in each minigame. The better your performance, the more medals are rewarded. There are also 3 difficulties, from 1-3 stars, and the higher the difficulty, the more medals you earn.
For example, during the Easy Hammer Tour (1 star), I hit the machine 91 times, which gave me a Gold Tortimer award (these are bronze/silver/gold and aren't tangible, just an award to judge how well you did) and 6 medals. During the Level-Up Hammer Tour (2 stars), I hit the machine 80 times, which gave me a Gold Tortimer award and 8 medals.
In addition, when playing with multiple people, you earn Bonus Medals based on how well you did in comparison to them. The way the games work is that they are a mix of cooperative and competitive. You all have to do something that works towards a collective goal, but you do get bonuses based on how well you did. So, again using the Hammer Tour as an example, you have to hit the machine 30 times within 3 minutes. Each person's hit would go towards the total, but at the end, they would also get bonus medals for how many times they hit it.
Once you earn 50 medals, you can earn membership to "Club Tortimer", which allows you to participate in Tours with random people on the Internet. If you're not a member, you can only go on Tours with people with whom you are friends. This is handy if you don't have friends that you can play with or they're on at times when you're not available, etc.
In conclusion, the fastest way to earn medals is by playing with multiple people as opposed to solo, and playing on higher rather than lower difficulties (and performing well, to boot).
Best Answer
You are punished for changing the game time (no matter how much, it seems), but not the system time. Here's what happens:
If you change the time on your 3DS system, Animal Crossing seems to simply think that's the time it is now. Trees grow, events change, the only "bad" things that happen would have happened with the flow of time. Even going back in time via this method seems to work okay, even when going to a day previously played.
If you change the game time, using the option at the main menu of Animal Crossing, you will randomly trip for a while after changing the clock. The duration of tripping seems to last longer than the current play session, possibly the full day? But it eventually goes away. If, however, you were to change the game time this way before every play session you would trip randomly every single session, which is highly frustrating.
Also note that going backwards in time will spoil any turnips you had, since the game knows you went backwards, while it doesn't know you went forwards if you go by the system clock.
tl;dr: Change your 3DS's system time to time travel, do not mess with the in-game clock regularly or will will randomly trip.