I am going to skip the "Suggestions for things that will be fun" and go out on a limb, possibly by myself.

Perl is a great language to stimulate a "problem solving" mentality. What tool (command) is best to get this part of the job done? And problem decomposition recognition, break big tasks into smaller ones. Or finding ways to generalize a solution to be useful to a class of problems.

But all of these are more in the realm of "System Engineering" as opposed to "Software engineering". I am not saying that most people in this field don't wear both hats in differing proportions most of the time.

At 14, Perl is fine to see if it stimulates the needed personality traits of the latent programmer. But down the road there are a lot of fundamental concepts that need to be understood in a more rigorous fashion, such as parameter passing methodologies, memory management (allocation, freeing, and reference counting), and other low level foundational concepts.

My progression was FORTRAN(no number), ALGOL, SNOBOL, early PASCAL,CDC Asssembler, COBOL, PL/1, REXX, 6502 & 68010 assembler, C, C++, (dropped JAVA), and now PERL