When beginning any academic research-y type of project, it always helps to consult the current body of research. See what's out there, what's been done, what questions are being asked, what is currently viewed as "interesting" by the scientific community.
http://scholar.google.com/
Google scholar is your friend for this, as are sites like jstor (
http://www.jstor.org/), though they may require access credentials or something. Got a local university to pester?
As I see it, there are a couple different "fields" to go with research related to this topic. I don't know the requirements, but some things that come to mind:
- computer science approach: graphical/computational modeling of snake movement, behavior, cognition (maybe not much there, see behavioral). Likely to require or benefit from much (ie. many hours of documented) observation of actual snakes in motion, going through their various kinds of locomotion, of varying ages, sizes, maybe species, in different environments, etc.
- mechanical approach: robotics, some sort of actual physical implementation to mimic snake movement. Also likely to require lots of observation of snakes beforehand.
- behavioral observation: precedent to the first two, likely you could get enough breadth over varying specimens of snakes, and enough depth over varying conditions and detail of observation/record, to make a descent little 2 month project. Remember, 2 months is almost no time at all in "research time." Like, nothing. One quarter of university time. Believe you me, that flies by. Consider how many hours you have to devote per week. Comparison: 40 hours/week is a full time job, 10 hours/week is considered full time research. There's observation time, setup time, documentation time, and of course the hours to compile your research and write up a good final product. Wow, sorry I got all long winded again ;P.
- cognitive goals: What are snakes thinking in those cute little heads? Much of anything? Mazes are one way these things are often tested in mammals, but reptiles don't quite work the same way. Snakes don't see mazes much in their environments, as rodents might. It seems like a lot of snakes' time is spent finding food, finding places to hide. So some experiments have been done with hides as the goal state, rather than food (since they don't eat a lot, and are often picky at that). There are questions of perception (ie. do snakes perceive color? To what degree? Are some colors indistinguishable?). Questions of reactions and preferences. Do snakes regard color or shape/size/temperature/etc. as more indicative of food/threat/safety/hide?
- biology: Someone mentioned intestinal microbes. That sounds interesting, if you have the equipment for fecal smears and such. Also consider that 2 months is only just barely enough time to get any kind of meaningful trend data for snakes that feed at most once every 5 days.
I think behavioral tests aiming at intelligence and perception and such are fascinating. I'd like to be able to find actual scholarly article references. O heck, why not, I'm waiting for traffic to drain anyway. On someone's thread about red light I got off on that tangent and found this site:
http://www.naturescornermagazine.com/snakes_learn.html (not actually scholarly material, I wish they cited the paper/source they describe, but I guess it gives you a vague idea the kinds of conditions you can test).
Alright, I don't really see any application of snake cognition to humans. But if it's not a requirement of the project, I still think it is cool to research snakes for the sake of knowing about ..snakes. If you want to research humans, generally you just research humans, unless it is the kind of dangerous/questionable ethical/medical application that is still in animal testing trials, and that is obviously not the kind of thing you want to be doing for this project, and in general you wouldn't use snakes (reptiles, too dissimilar).
If you want a mechanical application like lateral motion, you might want a more technological approach. Is this a science in general project, or a "life sciences" project? I think computational modeling (graphics, mathematics, the whole sha-bang) of the way snakes move is pretty cool, but maybe too far removed from the actual life for the requirements, though it could involve much observation of various snakes in their various forms of motion (did you know there are several? it's cool to watch your snake and pick out each one). Then there's also actual mechanical implementation to mimic the snake motion (robotics, for example) which has ...hey, I have a new hobby idea for when I have disposable income (soon!)! I have actually wanted to build a robotic snake since like...junior high lol. Funny how we remember these things years later and realize, hey I now have the resources! Well except I'm saving up to move, but ya know after that....
*Ahem* Sorry for all the random tangents. This is what happens when I have been bored for a couple hours and ideas start sparking.
Whatever you end up doing, absolutely please post results here! ^^
