Well, there are a couple of problems, here.

First, and foremost, you appear to have an instructor who gave you a Perl/MySQL assignment but 1) failed to provide any instructions for how to turn it in, or 2) failed to provide a mechanism for the assignment being evaluated. (That is something you might want to consider the next time you take a class).

The other 2 issues are not hard to resolve.
1) to modify the @INC array, use the use lib; directive at the beginning of your script:

BEGIN {
    use lib "/path/to/your/folder";
}
[download]

2) to resolve the database issue, you can use the --datadir switch when you start up the server:

<mysql server> --datadir=/path/to/your/folder
[download]

That should do it

davidj