With supply chain issues and rising price of construction materials, mycelium can potentially provide reliable, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives to traditional construction materials as substrates used for growing mycelium can contain almost any recycled cellulose: sawdust, used coffee grounds or paper. Characteristics of the final product are determined by substrate, mushroom species, the time of growth and further treatment of mycelium (e.g. high pressure forming). In this paper we describe semestral work of both students and tutors of an Experimental studio, focused on additive manufacturing together with rather novel sustainable materials. Students’ semestral task was to find use cases for mycelium as a building element. As a part of the assessment they were tasked to come up with use cases, designs, manufacturing methods and finally build a mock-up model in 1:5 scale. Students intuitively started with the combination of digital modelling plus digital fabrication. In the end they finished with manufacturing the physical model traditionally, where they had to react to the change of the visual outcome of the model. Firstly, we present the students’ solution for the mycelium material used in their model, next, we describe our observation of the whole process of letting students go through “learning by doing” research, Finally, we present lessons learned in this experiment.