Plastic mechanics is a course for graduate students in civil engineering specialty. The main contain of the course is the law of stress and strain changes when the object is plastic deformed. The course content is complex and the formulas are numerous, which inevitably makes students feel obscure. In view of the significance and problems of the plastic mechanics course, this paper carries out the curriculum teaching reform oriented by engineering application-oriented talents in order to stimulate students' interest in learning and combine with the new era and new media platform. Taking the teaching situation of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology as an example, the specific reform measures are put forward. An online classroom is established through the WeChat public account which increases the interaction between teachers and students, and optimizes the teaching content in the form of online course production. Examples teaching in civil engineering are added through new media tools based on the combination of theory and practice, which combines the design tools commonly used in the current civil engineering direction with traditional teaching, and presents them to students through multimedia teaching. A school-enterprise cooperation mode is established, including the network training for enterprise technicians, and virtual platform simulation training. Graduate students are required to review recent literature related to plastic mechanics and make reports, and report PPT in class which combines their research directions.