Integrating ideological and political elements into professional curriculum teaching is an inevitable trend and important direction of higher education curriculum reform. Taking civil engineering materials for the basic course of civil engineering as an example, according to the characteristics of the course, such as numerous and trivial knowledge points, strong engineering background, and multiple experimental links, through in-depth digging of ideological and political elements, a curriculum-based ideological and political education design method is proposed, mainly including the introduction of major country projects to stimulate students’ professional enthusiasm, practical engineering accidents to teach students engineering ethics, engineering cases as the teaching unit to cultivate students’ pragmatic style, the second classroom to cultivate students’ independent exploration ability. In addition, based on the actual situation of Southeast University, the practice path and evaluation method of curriculum-based ideological and political methods are introduced. The results show that this method can help stimulate students’ professional enthusiasm and patriotism, cultivate social responsibility, professional morality, engineering ethics and craftsman spirit, and implement the concept of full-staff education, full-process education, and all-round education, which can provide references for curriculum-based ideological and political construction of similar majors.