Q: 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.
[284, 41, 223, 131, 68, 18, 42, 290, 86, 248, 113, 299, 24, 285, 67, 48, 218, 79, 296, 158], k=7
A:
68