Abstract Fluid power education is most effective when conducted with hands-on applications and real-life projects. To optimize the students' understanding of fluid power systems, they need to interact with individual components and systems made by these components, ideally during their operation. However, this effective and widely implemented approach is limited in execution because of safety concerns, budgets, the number of participants, visibility, and available space. In addition, physical testing environments must be properly instrumented to showcase system changes and operations, which can be costly and time-intensive. This work showcases a solution to these challenges by introducing a fully immersive and interactive Mixed Reality (MR)/Virtual Reality (VR) laboratory for gear pumps. The laboratory exercises allow students to interact with parts and/or systems in a safe and immersive manner and help them gain knowledge using guided tutorials. This is achieved using Microsoft HoloLens, mixed reality smart glasses, to present students with interactive CAD models of assembled fluid power components and a tablet computer used for virtual interaction. This paper presents the procedures and materials used to create both a virtual gear pump and a relief valve, including their virtual assemblies, computational fluid dynamics, and animation of the parts interacting within them. The MR and VR devices show instructions and advice so that students may learn how the components and the fluid operate within a component and offer interactions with their moving parts to identify their individual parts. This allows students to identify the parts of a pump and assemble them. Three programs are used in conjunction with the Microsoft HoloLens and a tablet to create interactive experiences: (1) Autodesk Inventor Pro is used as the CAD modeling software to build virtual parts, (2) Unity functions as the environment building engine to house the project and (3) Ansys CFX for the fluid simulation to understand how the fluid behaves in the parts. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how these instructions are created and modified in real-time to better suit the needs for instruction and training in the fluid power classroom.