In discussions with leading educators from many different fields, MAA's CRAFTY (Curriculum Renewal Across the First Two Years) committee found that one of the most common mathematical themes in those other disciplines is the idea of fitting a function to a set of data in the least squares sense. The representatives of those partner disciplines strongly recommended that this topic receive considerably more attention in mathematics courses to develop much stronger links between mathematics and the way it is used in the other fields. Typically in regression analysis, multivariable calculus is used to minimize the sum of the squares of the deviations between the data values and the equation of the mathematical model, but these derivations are inaccessible to precalculus students. This paper describes how to derive the quadratic regression equation using algebra.