Johnston Student's Uncommon Honor for Planting the Seed of Knowledge

Mark Gee is an uncommon teen.

To reward his work to interest elementary students in science, he was honored with a Herbert Hoover Uncommon Student Award, along with 14 other Iowa high school juniors this spring.

While most students are spending the summer lounging by the pool or working summer jobs, Gee has been filling his Friday afternoons teaching local third- to fifth-grade students at the .

Gee's program — "Dream Big with Plants" — aims to instill a love of science in the younger generation by exploring plant identification, DNA extraction, and testing nutritional value of vegetables through hands-on activities.

"The main goal was to teach them that plants can be fun," said Gee, an incoming senior at said. "Plants are interesting and science is cool.

"A lot of high school kids think plants are boring."

Gee has always been interested in science, in fact he had planned to teach the free class even without the cushion of the Uncommon Student Award.

"I found the site (Uncommon Students) online and had an interest in plants and had this idea that involved something I enjoy and kids would think is fun," he said.

Gee sent in an application with lesson plans and how he would get materials. 

The scholarship program annually identifies up to 15 Iowa high school juniors who propose and then accomplish a project of their own choosing and design.

Through the program Gee will receive $1,000 for participating after giving a presentation in October in Hoover's hometown of West Branch.

A committee of accomplished Iowans will choose three students to win $5,000 college scholarships.

Gee's class was capped at 15 students, but there was enough interest that he could have hosted two classes.

• Week one - plant basics: Students learned about the structure of plants, how they grow and develop. Students also received two tomato plants to care for, one for their experiment to grow how they chose, some student "watered" the plant with milk. The second plant was for a group experiment where road salt was added to soil.

• Week two - plants in everyday life: Students wandered the library finding materials made of plants and at the end created a craft of their own

• Week three - plants on the micro-scale: Students discovered how plants function on a chemical level by extracting DNA from strawberries.

• Week four - plant identification in nature: Students traveled to the Beaver Creek Natural Resource Area to identify common plants and learn the difference between native and invasive species.

• The final week, which will take place Aug. 18, is a nutrition and plant fair. Students will test the nutritional value of the tomatoes they grew and compare them to those from a store.

Gee wasn't the only local student honored. Dylan Johnson, another incoming senior at JHS, was also named as an Uncommon Student.