Mycelial Modeling: Teaching Biology Students Statistical Modeling with Mushrooms

This paper summarizes and describes the development of a set of learning materials that were created to educate students and professionals from other fields in statistical modeling techniques. These materials are primarily aimed at biology students, but are still intended to be useful for anyone who is interested in incorporating decision trees and random forest models into their personal research in the future. By directing the reader towards the JMP software, these materials navigate around the statistical knowledge base and coding implementation practices that otherwise would serve as a barrier to learning statistical modeling techniques, and instead focus on the concepts they need to create these models and form accurate conclusions from them. This undertaking is intended to act as a stepping stone to assist others in developing effective interdisciplinary learning materials for statistics and data science using examples tailored to a specific field.