Integrating the ideological and political elements into the teaching of specialized courses, and forming synergistic effect with the ideological and political theory courses has become a new trend in the teaching of engineering courses in college and universities. However, how to better integrate the ideological and political elements with the teaching of specialized knowledge effectively to achieve the effect of moistening things silently is the emphases and difficulties faced by the teachers of specialized courses. Taking the course steel structure design principles which is a core curriculum of civil engineering as an example, this paper makes a preliminary exploration of the method and path of integrating the ideological and political elements into the teaching of specialized courses. Firstly, based on the "four self-confidence" and combined with the characteristics of the course, the curriculum politics construction objectives of institutional identity, cultural self-confidence, professional moral cultivation and scientific spirit are determined. Then, around the curriculum politics construction objectives, the corresponding ideological and political education points and the implementation paths of each chapter are summarized. And through four teaching cases, this paper briefly introduces the method of integrating ideological and political elements into the teaching of steel structure design principles. Finally, the reform method of integrating ideological and political elements into the usual performance assessment is proposed to achieve the purpose of comprehensive evaluation of specialize knowledge and ideological and political educational achievements.