The Recipe Approach

It's always helpful to first solve the problem manually.

This produces the recipe (or fancy: algorithm)

40 20 10 30

Basic Idea

Keep track of a "min" number
Walk the list
If visited element is smaller, set as min

Recipe

Generally:

We set the initial "min" to the first value.
We iterate or walk the list

Each iteration:

If array elem < min
	set min to that elem

In the end we have our min.

Set min to first element = 40

Visiting	Condition (elem<min)	Answer	New "min"
40	40 < 40	false	40
20	20 < 40	true	20
10	10 < 20	true	10
30	30 < 10	false	10

From Recipe to Pseudocode

Pseudocode follows nicely from the recipe.

set var "min" to first list value
iterate the list
	If array elem < min
		set min to that elem

Special Cases

Let us say, the problem also asked us to handle this special case:
//Special Case: if "list" contains no elements, return null

We try to take care of any special case(s) as the first step as shown.

if the list is empty
	return null
set var "min" to first list value
iterate the list
	If array elem < min
		set min to that elem

The Fun Begins

We would now open our lab, play and solve.

From our recipe, we can see that we have examples that should come in handy:

Array Iteration Lab
Array Basics Lab
Condition Statement Lab

set min to the first value
iterate the array
	If array elem < min
		set min to that elem