I guess I'll share how I got interested in Perl and Programming in general. I've always played on computers. Mainly games, I actually remember QBasic, I wonder how many 15 year olds have even heard of it. Anyways. I learned some basic stuff in that when I was about six, but I never really got past displaying characters and making the computer beep.

In sixth or seventh grade I decided I was going to start a web page. I went to geocities, and started a site. I downloaded an HTML tutorial and went to work. The first things there were horrible, to say the least, but I eventually I got better.

Then sometime in seventh grade I got a TI-81 calculator. I thought it was really cool, I mean just like at the screen. I ended up learning you could do programs on it. I looked at source and at my manual, I picked things up pretty quick. (It's only basic after all) I started writing programs to make my math easier/less time consuming. I wrote one to solve the quadratic equation, etc. Pretty basic stuff.

In eighth, I learned some JavaScript. I didn't get very far with it, but I wanted to do some cool stuff for my webpage. I read, and did some basic stuff, mainly with math.

Then, at the end of eighth I started looking at perl. It looked really cool, and I decided to learn it, having no idea about real programming. I found this place, and have learned quite a bit, and that's where I am today, a year and a half later. Hope this helps you find a starting point. I think that either math programming, or web stuff is good place to start. I guess it depends on the kid.

elusion :