The integration of civic and political elements into the English classroom is an innovative way to give full play to the role of college education in cultivating students’ worldview, outlook on life, and values, while student participation is an effective way to measure the quality of English civic and political courses. This paper incorporates artificial intelligence algorithms into the design of English Civics and Politics courses while examining student participation to foster the intelligent advancement of civics and politics reforms in college English classrooms. This paper combines artificial intelligence technology to construct a civics and politics teaching system for university English courses at various levels, catering to both teaching purposes and other learning objectives. It adopts critical technologies such as face detection, head posture detection, etc., and proposes a student participation evaluation model based on attention and fatigue state criteria. The civics and artificial intelligence elements were integrated into the “Comprehensive English” course to design the civics course of college English and carry out the teaching practice for one semester. The practice improved the student’s scores on the questionnaires in the areas of knowledge and skills, civic awareness, teamwork, and values by 84.64%, 104.74%, 58.92%, and 86.27%, respectively, compared to their pre-practice scores of 58.92% and 86.27%. The results of selecting students’ classroom videos and detecting their attention, fatigue state, and cognitive state show that students’ overall participation in the university English Civics classroom designed in this paper is high.