Online teaching based on computer and network technology has become a vital teaching mode under the current situation of the overwhelming COVID-19 epidemic. Teachers and students who fully understand and master basic knowledge and skills of various information technologies in online learning can stimulate students’ interest in learning information technology and train their ability in information collection, processing, and use. Given the lack of face-to-face communication and deep emotional exchange, online teaching has poor performance in improving the creative thinking ability of learners. During online teaching, teachers train the innovation consciousness quality of students in online courses successfully and improve the creative thinking ability of learners by using “asking,” “thinking,” “doing,” and “evaluation,” that is, the ATDE teaching mode. In this study, a teaching experiment was carried out on 41 undergraduates admitted in 2018 who majored in civil engineering at Zhengzhou University of Industrial Technology, Henan Province, China. Students were divided into the experimental group and the control group. The experimental group adopted the ATDE teaching mode for the course Design of concrete structure, while the control group applied the traditional teaching mode. A questionnaire survey of students’ creative thinking ability was conducted for both groups. Results showed that university students’ creative, emotional attitude under the ATDE teaching mode was far higher than that under the traditional (F=6.490, p=0.015). The creative thinking performance of university students under the ATDE teaching mode was higher than that under the traditional teaching mode (F=7.468, p=0.009). The Pearson correlation coefficient between creative, emotional attitude and creative thinking performance was 0.985 in the late test stage, which was higher than in the early test stage (0.480), which reveals that the ATDE teaching mode was conducive to improving abstract course learning effect of students majoring in civil engineering. Research conclusions can provide some references to investigate the feasibility of ATDE teaching mode in universities and offer a new choice and feasible path to train students’ creative thinking ability.