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Comment from S. Pollock (CU Boulder, visiting OSU and teaching Paradigm “Vector Fields), Nov 2009: 

I have never used Maple before (and our campus doesn't have a license), so this activity will not help me when I go back to CU. But with a terminal at every desk (as we have here at OSU) this activity worked extremely well. I spent ~20 minutes on it, leading the students step by step through the Maple spreadsheet. It's written clearly enough that the students were following (and asking or responding to frequent sense-making or "what will happen next" question). When we got to the total flux being "q/epsilon0" at the last step, this triggered a rush of "Gauss' law" recollections. We then went back and I let the students choose a new point to place the charge, and let them redo the calculations. This was great - some chose offset points in the cube, others out of the cube, and naturally one or two smart-alecks went for the corner and were completely baffled by the result. All three made for nice (brief) sense-making discussions with the class as a whole, and the latter (corner charge) was set up as a "think about this one more" ending (there's a homework problem on this from Griffiths) 

When we moved to a later activity (Gauss' law), students were spontaneously (or induced by me) going back to this Maple activity to "check" ideas. (For instance, when students later claimed that q_enc=0 MEANS E=0, I reminded them of the student who had put their charge outside the box...) 

-S