And it's easier to teach one thing early on and expand that knowledge later. If you teach to much, they will not retain the information.

For example, on day one you show them comments.

"Comments begin with the hash (or octothorpe) character."

# I am a comment!
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And leave the POD for a later day...

"Today we will learn about POD. POD is short for Plain Old Documentation and it is a fairly simple way of documenting your code. We'll begin by adding a heading to your existing project and then cut back to the code."

package Beginner::Project;
use strict;
use warnings;

# may or may not be lots of code here

=head1 NAME

Beginner::Project - a project worthy of a beginner Perl programmer

=cut

# your code continues here...

1;
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