I've been helping some friends learn programming, and they probably wouldn't describe themselves as algorithmic thinkers. What I found was a good starting point was talking about basic boolean logic and truth tables. The topic was really straightforward, felt foundational and there are tons of examples in all kinds of topics.
From there, we started talking about simple circuits/gates like AND, OR, etc. Then we started talking binary (and other bases), then binary arithmetic. At the end, I went over how integers are stored from a high level (and integer overflow for fun :) ).
There really wasn't a super high-level plan, but exposure to these topics I felt was a great intro to the mindset and we had good fun/progression during the session. From here, with booleans & integers as the foundation, I might feel comfortable writing pseudo-code and such with them, slowly bringing the abstraction higher.
