Due to the pandemic in spring 2020 the Young ERME Summer School (YESS) of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME) switched to using a synchronic online conference system. Two of seven thematic working groups (TWG5, TWG7) were designed to support students’ learning and development by mutually giving and getting feedback to individual presentations of research projects. In this liminal virtual space (Rouzie, 2001) however the usual way of joining attention in teaching/learning (Shvarts & Abrahamson, 2019) where the sensory motor system of the body is at play is reduced to voicing, hearing, sharing screens mediated by technology. How this disembodied environment could meet the students’ needs, was our principal design issue. Two design elements were implemented: the research pentagon, a tool to structure and reflect research with respect to research aims, objects, questions, situations and methods (Bikner-Ahsbahs, 2019), and building pairs of critical friends, prior to the school to ensure mutual in-depth feedback. We organised each of 10 sessions by a (linear) sequence of five types of pentagon-use in the TWGs: presenting own research, critical friend’s feedback, expert’s feedback, peer feedback and listening to peers' giving and getting feedback. According to Lefebvre (1991; 2004) space is socially constructed developing over time, where space, time and energy are interrelated by rhythm, the latter being bodily founded. Rhythm is created by repetition in time and space with variations. Thus, each session was shaped by a linear rhythm of pentagon-use, which was cyclically repeated in the course of the school. This third paper employs rhythmanalyses to answer two research questions: How were the rhythmically organised sessions experienced, and how was this related to students’ efforts? Interview data were used to analyse each students’ experience of rhythm, then the experiences of each type of pentagon-use was compared across all the students. Repeated references to the pentagon related to various research topics resulted in the surprising fact that listening to the peers’ giving and getting feedback was essential for the students’ learning and development. It is the investment of effort that together with the experience of growing knowledge seemed to empower the students (Ernest, 2002). This can be explained by the concept of thinking space (Perret-Clermont, 2004) as the virtual space, socially constituted by the rhythm of varying pentagon-uses across research realms in the students’ interactions, has provided resources that the students experienced as crucial for their epistemic inquiry in research.

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