You timed this question very well! Yesterday our 12 year old son asked me how to write script for a game system (Morrowind). So I signed him up with PerlMonks and pointed him at the tutorials section. He started with baby steps. We managed to skip over most of the stuff about getting Perl installed etc., down to the hello world - which of course was a little more interesting when we substituted his name.

After that it was mostly feeding him little bits to augment the stuff he was reading in the tutorial. For example, at one point he wanted to check that a reply was a number, so I wrtoe a "magic" isNumber sub for him using some regex "magic". He was very happy with the magic, and spent the rest of the afternoon writing Perl to ask questions (sometimes in a loop for a "correct" answer), check answers and do simple arithmetic ("Half your age is ...").

At the end of the afternoon he knew about variables, print, <STDIN>, chomp, eq, ne, lc, last, redo, strings and interpolation (although not explicitly, just through use) and probably other stuff I don't remember. He is also keen to learn more. He was very keen to post his "first program" to PerlMonks. Anyone want to suggest a suitable section (Meditations perhaps), but I disuaded him - somewhat reluctantly.

If anyone wants to /msg Panda, he'd probably be quite excited :)