As one of the courses for civil engineering majors, seismic design of building structures is difficult because of its complicated and uninteresting contents. During the teaching activities, there are some problems, such as the difficulty of real experiments, the neglect of practice and so on. Based on this issue, virtual experiments with high interactivity and maneuverability is applied to seismic design of building structures teaching, compared with the traditional real experiments, the paper analyzes the importance and necessity of virtual experiments in this course. After that, taking seismic isolation technology as an example, design ideas about virtual experiments offering reference for others are put forward. Virtual experiment is favorable, it is necessary to make use of virtual experiments in civil engineering teaching and pay attention to interactivity. It should be realized that real experiments are also important because virtual experiments are just supplement to real experiments.