Instructions: In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.
Input: [254, 115, 173, 94, 228, 168, 130, 202, 129, 42, 142, 61, 15, 244, 185, 123, 144, 256, 49, 227], k=1
Output:
15