Fostering of computational thinking (CT) skills has become an essential goal for engineering courses. This paper provides and discusses a teaching approach based on model‐eliciting activity (MEA) for enhancing students' CT in existing engineering courses. To verify the proposed approach, experimental studies were performed with students in the practicum unit of a computer‐aided engineering course. First, we investigated the feasibility of integrating CT training into the engineering courses through guiding students to perform a topic‐specific design task. Second, we compared the influences of the MEA‐based approach and conventional lecture‐based approach on students' learning effect with respect to course objectives and CT skills. Results show the CT‐integrated teaching did not at least weaken the teaching effect of the engineering course, and the MEA‐based approach seems to be more conducive to strengthening students' skills of identifying and solving problems, as well as team cooperation. Results also show the learning effect of the MEA group has apparent advantages for enhancing CT skills. These findings suggest that using MEA in engineering courses is beneficial to promote students' CT skills in terms of simplification, embedding, transformation, and simulation.