Data science practices are fundamental to data driven and data informed industries. Data science is core to computing science and involves a programmatic approach to exploratory data analysis and data mining as well as the use of machine learning to build highly predictive models. Before undertaking machine learning it is important for students to understand descriptive and inferential statistics as well as the grammar of visual analytics in order to understand patterns and associations in large datasets and for selecting the best combination of features for optimising predictive models and machine learning approaches. Examples will be provided to support students learning.