A challenge in today's design education practice is to formulate and use methods that support competences in the in-between-space between basic form training and learning that is relevant for designers in the future society. The aim of the paper is to discuss and to evaluate prototyping exercises in design education placed in that in-between space. Four different approaches to prototyping exercises are described, examined and evaluated in the paper. The prototyping exercises are engaging the students in the learning cycle phases of learning by experimentation and learning by experiencing. The result shows that the prototyping exercises did support learning of diverse competences in that in-between space but were also counterproductive and met different kinds of resistance in the students. This paper invites to a dialogue on how different prototyping techniques in design education might be used when educating designers.