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Use the verbal directions below instead of a handout:

Students should be assigned to work in groups of three and given the following instructions using the visual of a hula hoop or other large ring: “This is a ring with total charge Q and radius R. Find the electrical field due to this ring in all space. Stop when you have an expression that could be evaluated using Maple.”

Students do their work collectively with markers on a poster-sized sheet of whiteboard at their tables.

Rabindra's note:

Since students worked with potential of a ring charge in their previous class, many of them started with potential of the ring everywhere in space. Then they attempted to find electric field by taking a negative gradient of the potential. Although they eventually realized that they needed start the electric field from Coulomb's law, most of them did not write the electric field in vector form.

Student also were not sure about how to integrate a vector quantity. However, with some scaffolding ($\int[f(x) + g(x)]dx = \int f(x)dx + \int g(x) dx$ and $\int cf(x) dx = c\int f(x) dx$), student were able to integrate the vector, nonetheless with some difficulty.