You might consider a real world project, whose assignments would be stages in the project. One idea might be a web page for the high school football team, with scores and stats. Assignment might be things like:

• Introduction to MySQL
• MySQL I/O using Perl DBI.
• Calculations using data read from MySQL database.
• Introduction to Perl CGI.
• Making a dynamic web page.
• Making an input form.

The example I give would require access to a MySQL database and an apache server. But setting those up could be an assignment too ;).

If your local football coach can't give you data, then one assignment could be:

Scraping high school football data off the local sports page.