This is the first school of the WG1 The Milky Way as a Galaxy of the EU COST action  MW-GAIA. The objective of this working group is the exploitation of Gaia data in combination with other survey data to address some of the most important questions in the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. 
Being N-body and hydrodynamic simulations key tools to undertake the structure, star formation history, and dynamical evolution of the Milky Way, the goal of the school is to provide a general view of the current state of the art and challenges in simulating the formation of Milky Way size galaxies.
Currently, High Performance computing and Data Science tools are key to perform and analyze these simulations and to do a fair comparison with observations. With this in mind, it is a key goal of the school to provide the students of the skilles they need to deal with such simulation/real data.