Engineering is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, and effective mechatronics education is an essential part of modern curricula. This paper focuses on a hands-on approach to teaching mechatronics, from high school to university levels, using affordable and accessible equipment. It will showcase recent and innovative results that enhance students' practical learning in the core areas of mechatronics: mechanics, electronics, and software engineering. The goal is to demonstrate how educators can integrate topics from various engineering disciplines to enrich the learning process, especially for students with diverse knowledge backgrounds. By employing a broader engineering perspective, the methodology proposed aims to present educators with practical examples that can be used to improve engagement and understanding in mechatronics education across educational levels.

The proposed idea has been developed thanks to the support of GEMS (Graceful Equalising of Mechatronics Students) project. Co-funded by the European Union, under the action KA220-HED - Cooperation partnerships in higher education (2022-1-SI01-KA220-HED-000087727), where four partners collaborate altogether: University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; University of Alcala, Spain; Teaching Factory competence center, Greece; Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

The complete development is four-fold:
- Firstly, low-cost hardware and free software tools are used in order to make individual and easy-to-use mechatronic devices to learn and work with, all along a carefully plan organized in steps well documented with multimedia tools, and including a recycling program for the hardware, so that all students focus of GEMS project can do it by their own.
- Secondly, a detailed MOOC organized in the different modules, needed to understand and put in practice all hardware elements and basics, has also been designed, on edX platform, with the support of Delft University.
- Finally, all elements described have been step-by-step tested by real students within a two years process, in order to get evidences that feedback the methodological proposal in order to do the needed modifications in all steps of GEMS.
- Moreover, an important task of dissemination has been organized all along the four countries that participate in GEMS, both within universities and high-schools, so that seminars, demo-shows and even summer-schools have validated the whole proposal (hardware-software, MOOC, recycling) within teachers.
The conclusion is that the proposal works, as it engages mechatronic study within the different type of students tackled by the project.

Keywords: Mechatronics, Higher-Education, Equalizing, MOOC.