Mendel used peas.
A dominant gene is a gene that will be the powerful one you could say. And a recessive gene is the weaker one. For example if D is blue (and dominant) and d was yellow (recessive) and you would get something like Dd then that off spring will blue not yellow, if that makes sense.
Genotypes are the letters I used like Dd, dd, DD.
And phenotypes are what the pair of letters respond to: Dd=blue, dd=yellow, DD= blue. Think of phenotypes as the how they will look physically. Hope this makes sense.