Is it reasonable to take up some of the class with statistical basics and intuition? E.g. you just referred to a bigger N; I don't know what level your students are but do they have a basic intuition for notions like "variance of estimator"? Or is that another class? I think my point is that even if they can nowadays press a button and have the most amazing reports and visualizations produced, that doesn't give anyone any actual understanding of the theoretical side of data science.