[sizzla]

I would rather teach them:

1) how to write a program that guesses a number you thought of by doing binary search.

2) solve 2-queens

3) solve n-queens

4) solve knapsacking or some other combinatorial problem requiring memoization or DP. Of course, I wouldn't tell them any of those buzzwords that are meant to scare them away from just hacking on it.

Their mind will be blown regardless of the language they used and they'll get a feel for O() without even opening Cormen.