Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the teaching of psychology in college has become especially important, posting higher requirements on the teaching content and purpose of the course of psychology. Nowadays, the traditional course of public psychology in college only focuses on the prevention and correction of psychological problems among college students, but educators ignore the importance of teaching students to understand psychological problems through relevant courses, making it impossible to achieve the expected effect of mental health education for students. Colleges should apply the notion of positive mental health education in the course of public psychology designed for college students. Students can better adapt to the society only when they have sound mental quality. According to requirement of “the zone of proximal development” a conceptual framework of the course was established in this study based on adaptation theory in which students are encouraged to think independently, as required by and an autonomous learning situation was created for students with psychological problems. At the same time, the education and teaching programming software named Scratch was adopted and integrated in the virtual simulated experimental teaching system of psychology. The integrated teaching system included the management of psychological teaching software, the monitoring of psychological experimental process, the query and analysis of psychological experimental data and the management of academic experimental resources, forming an integrated teaching environment with adaptive learning functions. In the end, the ant colony algorithm was used to mine a learning mode that is commensurate with the learner’s knowledge level, meets the learner’s resource preferences and satisfies the learner’s needs for learning activities, and this learning mode was identified as the best application mode for the learning of public psychology. It was revealed in practice that the adaptive learning mode of psychology based on virtual simulation technology can improve students’ learning initiative for the course of public psychology and increase their independent innovation ability.