Teaching core principles of machine learning with a simple machine learning algorithm

Data science is a new interdisciplinary science that focuses on extracting insights and value from data. Upon scanning introductory data science courses, one usually finds that they include several machine learning algorithms of different kinds. In this paper, we propose that only one simple algorithm may be sufficient for such courses, illustrating our approach using the KNN algorithm. This approach is implemented in the basic level of the data science unit of the Israeli high school computer science curriculum. We invite the readership to suggest other algorithms that may serve as the sole algorithm taught in introductory data science courses.