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dave0
Maybe I'm a bit out of touch with what 8-year-olds would be capable of or interested in, but it's probably a good idea to avoid Perl. I don't think there's any way an 8-year-old can learn anything interesting in or about Perl in 20 minutes.
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If you want to give them a good starting point for learning to program, show them <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_programming_language">Logo</a> and teach them some of the basics. In 20 minutes, you can probably introduce them to instruction statements and looping, and get them to write a simple program to draw a square using turtle graphics. It's not much, but it lets them actually try to do something themselves.
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