You will be given a definition of a task first, then some input of the task.
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.

[278, 41, 208, 239, 246, 23, 268, 17, 96, 253, 248, 177, 244, 15, 280, 60, 59, 257, 199, 123], k=13
Output:
244