China's higher vocational nursing education continues to develop. Teaching methods based on classroom lectures are difficult to achieve high-quality teaching results. Nowadays, clinical nursing has an increasing demand for all aspects of higher vocational nursing students. "Surgical Nursing" is a required course for nursing students and the key content of the nurse professional qualification examination. Experiential teaching was introduced as an innovative teaching method. The research aims to achieve several goals: 1) To compare the surgical nursing learning achievement of students between using experiential teaching and traditional teaching methods. 2) To investigate student attitudes toward learning surgical nursing course after using experiential teaching activities. Participants were five-year vocational nursing students studying nursing at a university in Sichuan, China. A control group of 46 students and an experimental group of 46 students were selected through cluster random sampling. This study used the learning achievements and learning attitudes of surgical nursing as research tools. The results of the study showed that participants' learning achievements and learning attitudes in surgical nursing were significantly improved in experiential teaching methods. These findings highlight the effectiveness and practicality of experiential teaching in higher vocational nursing education. It is recommended that further research be carried out to Experiential teaching methods are used in the teaching of other majors to promote the sustainable development of teaching.