Week Template: AI Engineering Lab (Rich Lesson Standard v2)

This is the spec every week folder must meet. A week is a lesson, not a pointer: someone with a laptop and this folder alone should be able to study, build, and check off the whole week. Contributors must follow this standard (.github/CONTRIBUTING.md).

week-NN/
├── README.md # THE lesson: 2,000 to 3,500 words, self-contained study guide
├── notebooks/ # 1 to 3 runnable Jupyter notebooks (see Notebook standards)
├── exercises.md     # graded exercises + hints + the week's checklist
└── quiz.md          # 10 questions with answer key (self-check)

README.md: required sections, in order

1. Title + header block: # Week NN: <Title> and the "Part of Zorost AI Lab · Week NN of 24 · Section · Category" banner, plus the 🎯 use-case line.
2. The problem (150 to 300 words), the real-world ZoroLogistics scenario this week solves. Why it matters, what goes wrong without it, and a concrete before/after (e.g., "without a time-aware split, our model 'predicts' the future and looks brilliant until it ships").
3. Objectives: 4 measurable, Friday-shaped ("By Friday you can…").
4. Day-by-day plan: Mon to Fri table: what to study, what to run, what to ship each day, with time estimates.
5. Concepts: the heart of the lesson: 1,200 to 2,000 words of original exposition covering every topic in the manifest for that week. Requirements:
   • at least 3 tables (comparisons, sizing, decision rules)
   • at least 1 Mermaid diagram (flow, architecture, or decision tree)
   • at least 2 worked examples with concrete numbers from the ZoroLogistics data (e.g., a token budget, a metric calculation, a cost estimate)
   • inline links to the knowledge base for deeper dives (link, don't duplicate)
   • one "How it breaks" subsection (the failure modes this week's technique prevents or causes)
6. Notebook walkthrough (300 to 600 words), what each notebook does section by section, which cells to modify, what each final metric means, and what "correct" output looks like.
7. The use case (Friday): the concrete deliverable, the Zorost gate ("a stranger can inspect it and you can show what it did"), and a stretch variant for fast learners.
8. Common pitfalls: 6 to 8 named failure modes with the fix for each, as a table.
9. Glossary: 8 to 12 terms defined in one sentence each.
10. Self-check (quiz): link to quiz.md and the passing bar (8/10).
11. Exercises: the four graded exercises (easy/standard/stretch/portfolio) with a one-line pointer to exercises.md for hints.
12. Sources: 5 to 12 URLs: vendor docs, papers, and letters actually consulted.

quiz.md standard

# Week NN, Quiz (10 questions, 8/10 to pass)

<10 questions covering concepts AND notebook code; mix multiple-choice and
short-answer; each question ends with "(see Concepts §X or notebook cell Y)">

## Answer key
<1 to 2 sentence answer per question, with the reasoning>

exercises.md standard

# Week NN, Exercises & Checklist

## Graded exercises
1. **Easy**, …
2. **Standard**, …
3. **Stretch**, …
4. **Portfolio**, …

## Hints
<one hint per exercise, direction, never the full solution>

## Checklist (mirrors manifest.json + Excel tracker)
- [ ] Mon: …
- [ ] Tue: …
- [ ] Wed: …
- [ ] Thu: …
- [ ] Fri: …
- [ ] Sat: Take the quiz (8/10 to pass)
- [ ] Milestone: …

Notebook standards (unchanged from v1)

1. First markdown cell = title + # Requirements: pip install … + ⚠️ REQUIRES banner where applicable.
2. zoro import cell: import sys, pathlib; sys.path.insert(0, str(pathlib.Path.cwd().parents[1])).
3. Deterministic seeds everywhere; final code cell prints a NUMBER.
4. Markdown narration between sections (why before how).
5. nbformat 4.5; code cells "outputs": [], "execution_count": null; Python 3.12 kernelspec; every cell's source is a list of lines ending in \n.
6. API keys via os.environ with graceful skip messages; cost warnings before paid calls.