The ubiquitous acquisition and generation of data require a reworking of curricula in introductory statistics in tertiary education. We present a renewed curriculum that focuses on scientific thinking, modeling, and simulation-based inference, utilizing R and various R tools such as shiny and learnr apps. We teach statistics from a data-centric perspective, enabling the students to become data literate. Initial feedback of students and educators at our university of applied sciences shows that students' conceptual understanding improved and they understood the practical applicability of statistics better.