Learning to Care for Babies
Sago Mini Babies puts your toddler or preschooler in the role of caregiver to four humanized baby animals. The app provides eight activities for your child to experience with the four babies, including diaper changing, feeding, bottle giving, bath time, dress-up, dancing, playing with blocks, and enjoying a swing.
How to Play
As babysitter to Robin the bird, Jinja the cat, Harvey the dog, and Jack the rabbit, kids select the activity they want to explore with the baby of their choice. The baby will follow the child's finger across the screen, or the child can tap on the baby to pick it up and carry it. Players find the activity of choice by scrolling to the right or left. As the scenery changes, activities appear and are indicated with a star. For example, when you see the closet with the star above the door, stopping there triggers the dress-up activity. To leave an activity and return to the scrolling scenery, the child must tap the arrow in the top left corner of the screen.
In each of the eight activities, the player is front and center. Kids decide which outfit to try on, how to push the swing, what blocks to stack, when to soap up and rinse the baby, etc.
App Analysis
Sago Mini Babies exudes charm and welcomes young children to play with its endearing baby animals. The animations and interactions elicit both giggles and empathy as these characters respond to the actions of the player. If you try to feed a baby a food it doesn't like, it will respond by scrunching up its mouth and looking unhappy. However, if you tap a drum or play an instrument in the dance activity, the little darling with wiggle from side to side in glee.
Because the babies are so responsive to the player's actions, the app encourages exploration. And little touches -- like the photo you take in the dress-up activity showing up on the wall in the bedroom -- motivate kids to tap every object in each scene. And most of those taps are rewarded with some animation from silly characters showing up to flowers filling an empty vase.
A slight niggle in Sago Mini Babies comes from navigation in and out of the eight activities. Remembering to tap the arrow at the top isn't intuitive, and the arrow is too small for little fingers. We also noticed that it can be hard to get some of the accessories to stick to the baby in the dress-up activity. We hope the developer will fix these slight hiccups in upcoming updates.
We recommend that parents play with their child to help them understand the navigation, and to listen to the stories their child will make up along the way. Sago Mini Babies is a fabulous way to teach young children about how to nurture others. It also provides an interactive way for your child to better understand bodily functions and emotions. The babies in this app do poop and burp, have likes and dislikes, and cry and giggle. And when they get tired, they curl up on a sleeping rug with a lovable white Yeti to keep them company.
Best For
Sago Mini Babies is a darling app for both toddlers and preschoolers, who get to become the caregiver to babies. It is a perfect starter app, so if you have a child who is new to using a smartphone or tablet, begin their digital experience with this app.
Sago Mini Babies is also the perfect app to download when your older child becomes a new big sister or big brother -- it can help with the adjustment of having a new baby in the house.
To watch our video review of
Sago Mini Babies:
click here.
Bonus Tip
If your kids love these characters, they also star in the other
Sago Mini apps. We have compiled our favorites of those other apps into a rec list called
Best of Sago Sago Apps which you can view by
clicking here.
This Sago Mini Babies app review was written by Jinny Gudmundsen.
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
