I have to second the deck of cards approach. One particularly effective exercise is to hand someone a shuffled deck of numeric cards and ask them to write down a process for sorting them, using only the concept of bigger or smaller. Given about 20 minutes, most people will come up with selection sort on their own.<p>It&#x27;s this sort of introspection that&#x27;s key to understanding computers. We abstract large chunks of computational thinking naturally. It&#x27;s essential to be able to ask yourself, &quot;How am I really doing this?&quot; - and to come up with an answer.<p><i>edited slightly for grammar</i>