It may not be suitable for your venue, but it sounds like a good place to demonstrate the roots of perl. Perl as a better awk, sh, and sed all rolled into one. Which is to say, if you aren't familiar with Unix, Perl as a text manipulation tool.

How many times have DBA's had the problem: How do I get this cruddy data cleaned up and into my database? The answer is Perl.

This could be a fine showcase for perl. How to change integers to tri-state sql booleans? How to extract sql data from HTML data? How to populate small static tables in an sql database?

How to clean up hand entered data? Like

EDP^DESCRIPTION^WGHT^...
1001^stl sq .5^.425^...
1002^Steel Square 3/4^1.92^...
1002^SQ STL C1018 1.25"^5.31^...
1003^steel round C1215 1"^2.67^...
[download]

to extract shape, grade, size in decimal, weight_per_what if available and to enforce a standardized abbreviation and capitalization pattern upon the data.

In a few years someone may recall how that guy in database class solved the tough munging problem they're facing now with just a paragraph of Perl.